


8 

8 






BXi**£W 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



Chap. Copyright No. 

SheltJX'iSfc*f 

&s 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



College Training 

for Women 



BY 



KATE HOLLADAY CLAGHORN, Ph.D. 
(yale) 



vU l 






New York: 46 East 14TH Street 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 

Boston : 100 Purchase Street 










Copyright, 1897, 
By Kate Holladay Claghorn. 



C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS, 
PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH. 



MARTHA HOLLADAY CLAGHORN 

IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

OF WISE COUNSEL AND UNFAILING SYMPATHY 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 

IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED. 



Thanks are due to The Outlook for 
its courtesy in permitting the author 
to use, in the preparation of this book, 
five articles previously contributed by 
her to its columns. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. What the College can do . . i 

II. The Preparation 31 

III. Choosing a College 64 

IV. Life at College 98 

V. The Graduate Student . . .130 

VI. Alumnae Associations . . . .162 
VII. The College-Trained Mother . 199 
VIII. The College- Woman as a Social 

Influence 214 

IX. College Training for the Wage- 
earner 245 



COLLEGE TRAINING FOR 
WOMEN. 



CHAPTER I. 

WHAT THE COLLEGE CAN DO. 

IT does not seem to matter how many 
times we have found out by past ex- 
perience that any way of life, any theory 
carried out into action, any social insti- 
tution adopted into practice, has both its 
advantages and its disadvantages, its 
harms and its helps also for society in 
general; that the good has never been 
so good as to make the world completely 
over; that the bad has never been so 
z 



2 COLLEGE TRAINING 

bad but that humanity has contrived to 
struggle along under it somehow — when 
we look to the future, we are prone to 
see in any new scheme or plan all the 
concentrated and absolute good or evil 
that has never, in the history of the hu- 
man race, been embodied in any one 
institution. It will regenerate the world, 
to our thinking, or else it will send it to 
ruin. Little by little, experience of the 
new plan of life reveals its limitations 
and imperfections both of good and evil ; 
we cease to hope so much from it, or to 
entertain such fears concerning it, and 
the institution is seen for what it really 
is, — a centre of certain definite lines of 
influence, more or less effective in their 
operation, and more or less restricted in 
their scope. 

To this latter stage of exact and une- 



FOR WOMEN. 3 

motional comprehension, general thought 
about the collegiate training of women 
has not altogether arrived. We are still 
largely in the period of extravagant ex- 
pectation of comprehensive good or evil. 
The fear is often expressed that the col- 
lege woman, as a result of her college 
experiences, will lose her health, her 
womanly charm, her chance of matri- 
mony, her possibilities of motherhood, 
her taste for domestic life, her interest 
in her home and in her home-friends ; 
that society will, in consequence of any 
considerable spread of collegiate educa- 
tion among women, be reduced to an 
unrelated, unattached assemblage of self- 
centred and self-conscious celibates. On 
the other hand, the most comprehensive 
demands are made upon the supposedly 
exhaustless treasure we expect the col- 



4 COLLEGE TRAINING 

lege woman to have laid up in the four 
short years of her college life. She is 
supposed to be stored, not only with all 
manner of learning, so that any problem 
of any nature may be solved by her at 
any casual presentation of it, but she is 
required to show a power of invention 
and original production, to exhale a fine 
aroma of culture, to present a finished 
manner and bearing, to be heard in well- 
modulated accents and delicately chosen 
words, to make an agreeable and artistic 
appearance in dress, and to evidence an 
all-around and harmonious physical de- 
velopment. 

By this time, however, the college for 
women has been so long at work that 
we can perhaps avoid disappointment by 
looking at it closely in its actual con- 
crete conditions, to see just what it does 



FOR WOMEN. 5 

and can do, and just what it does not 
and cannot do. 

In the first place, we may expect the 
college to open to the student the great 
stores of information collected by the 
human race in its long journey out of 
the past. Of late a wholesome reaction 
has taken place against the idea that the 
imparting of fact is the only business of 
teaching; but this reaction has now gone 
so far that there is danger of our forget- 
ting how indispensable, after all, is a 
sure and easy command of mere brute 
fact in the endeavor to deal with most 
problems. The thinker can have his ef- 
fect in the world about him only by tak- 
ing account of what is really there; he 
can have effect upon the minds of the 
people in it only by taking account of 
what their minds contain. In old times 



6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the accessible stock of information about 
the concrete facts of life and the world 
was so small that any thinker who exer- 
cised his mind on its problems not only 
could, but was compelled to, present a 
large proportion of theory to a small 
proportion of definitely known truth ; by 
to-day, however, so vast a bulk of fact 
has been gathered, and is so generally 
accessible, that to build theory upon the 
slender foundations allowable in those 
older times will brand the thinker as a 
sciolist and a pretender. The college, 
then, if it wants to influence life and 
thought through its graduate, must teach 
facts, and more persistently and insis- 
tently than ever. 

It must, besides, teach some principles 
of selection and arrangement to make 
those resources of fact available. The 



FOR WOMEN. 7 

more the student has to take into her 
mind, the more necessary it is that she 
should stow it away in good order, so 
that she can know what is there, and 
what it is good for. The college should 
teach her to relate her acquirements to 
certain leading lines of thought, around 
which they may cluster naturally, and 
hold together by the force of their rela- 
tion. It should teach her to separate 
the important from the unimportant in 
that relation, the relevant from the ir- 
relevant ; that which typifies, explains, or 
illustrates from that which is not so typi- 
cal or explanatory ; that which forms one 
link in a continuous chain of develop- 
ment, either logical or concrete, from 
that which is presented without its cause 
on the one hand and its effect on the 
other. 



8 COLLEGE TRAINING 

Facts and a method, — the matter and 
form of knowledge, — the acquirement 
of these is the result that the college 
aims at directly and ostensibly. For 
this it plans in its curriculum ; the steps 
to this can be set down in black and 
white in its catalogue. 

There are, besides, certain indirect 
results of the college discipline brought 
about by the circumstances under which 
the direct and intended results are pro- 
duced that are less definitely noticed, 
and perhaps even more worthy of atten- 
tion, — "by-products " of the educational 
process, so to speak, which, like the 
"by-products" of certain mechanical 
and chemical processes, may turn out 
to be of as much if not of more value 
than the main product itself. 

Such "by-products" are especially 



FOR WOMEN. 9 

manifested in those elements of feeling 
rather than of thought, of taste rather 
than of intellectual discrimination, that 
go to make up that elusively indefinite 
complex we know as personal character. 
The student leaves college not only with 
certain definite intellectual traits estab- 
lished, but with certain ways of looking 
at things, and of bearing herself in rela- 
tion to them. An intricate network of 
preferences and dislikes, ideals, notions, 
fancies, prejudices, perhaps, has formed 
itself in her mind, and will determine 
largely the uses and availability of her 
mental equipment. How is this net- 
work woven ? 

Chief among the influences formative 
of personal character is the personal 
character of others. Within the college 
walls, whatever relations the student 



IO COLLEGE TRAINING 

may have besides with the outside 
world, she is under three sets of influ- 
ences, — that of the teaching body, that 
of the governing body, and that of the 
student body as a whole. The college 
instructor may teach directly, in set les- 
son, facts and a method ; he teaches 
indirectly, in every word he says, in 
every look and act, the elements of his 
own character. One will come before 
his class a daily lesson in vanity, un- 
worthy emulation, showiness, envy, and 
jealousy ; another will give indirect, but 
none the less effective, instruction in the 
arts of the tyrant, — browbeating, bully- 
ing, and sarcasm ; another will display 
carelessness of duty, and carry out in 
practice the principle that the merce- 
nary motive is the strongly constraining 
one; another will evidence in his own 



FOR WOMEN. I I 

person the power of the flesh ; still an- 
other will teach by his presence an un- 
wearied enthusiasm in pursuit of the 
best, a noble largeness of sympathy and 
purity of motive, and that disinterested 
devotion to truth and to humanity which 
is the crown of the scholar's life. 

Perhaps the most interesting of the 
influences at work upon the student is 
that of the student body of which she 
forms a part. This influence has always 
been vaguely recognized. It has been 
remarked many a time that the college 
boy learns more from his fellows than 
from his teachers; but little definite 
thought has been given to find out just 
what that influence is, how far it ex- 
tends, what, exactly, are the lessons it 
tries to teach, and what means it em- 
ploys to teach them. We are now learn- 



12 COLLEGE TRAINING 

ing to think of a social group as a 
collective person, with thoughts and 
feelings of its own, and to believe that 
from it is developed the individual per- 
son — a result, not a cause, of the social 
personality. The group is the origi- 
nally active power ; the individual is 
the result: the group character is not 
formed by adding together the individ- 
ual characters of its members ; those in- 
dividual characters are formed by contact 
with the group character. The student 
body of a college is one of those " social 
persons ;" and it is interesting to watch 
in it the same formative process going on 
that was at work in the beginning to es- 
tablish our human traits, and has been at 
work ever since, in some way or other, 
to shape them. 

A complete study of the student-group 



FOR WOMEN. 13 

as a sociological force has not yet been 
made ; certain leading traits are, how- 
ever, obvious. There is a curious inter- 
est attaching to the study of this group 
from the fact that it parallels in many 
features the primitive group of human 
society in general. Just as in the de- 
velopment of the physical organism the 
human creature in its successive embry- 
onic and infantile forms shows the stages 
traversed by the succession of species 
in their struggle upward to man, so the 
group formed of the young of the race 
reproduces the traits manifested in the 
group of the young race. The first no- 
table characteristic common to the col- 
lege-group and primitive society is the 
great relative control of the whole over 
the parts. In both the group dominates 
the individual with tyrannical sway; in 



14 COLLEGE TRAINING 

neither is the individual developed so 
far as to be able to stand upon his own 
character and judgment. Every one 
knows how susceptible the young are 
to opinion; the criticism, ridicule, or 
approval of their kind seems about the 
only influences they are really and deep- 
ly touched by. Ethnology teaches how 
strong a trait in primitive races is their 
abasement before the same impalpable 
force. The girl going to college finds 
that she must conform closely to certain 
well understood rules of manners and 
morals ; the primitive tribesman is born 
into a society governed by an elaborate 
code, which neither he nor any one else 
would think it proper to disobey or 
change. Another obvious trait of the 
college-personality also common to 
primitive man is that its code has more 



FOR WOMEN. 15 

to do with manners than morals, with 
acts than thoughts, with rites and cere- 
monies than with intentions and motives. 
The " college-spirit " prescribes certain 
ways of behavior, speech, and dress as 
fitting or the reverse, and shapes the 
outer man or woman into conformity 
with its own type. 

Like primitive man, too, the college 
personality lays down an unwritten code 
of tradition and custom, rather than a 
written code of rule and regulation. The 
young are commonly thought of as the 
arch-radicals of nature, the born de- 
stroyers of all rule and law. It is, how- 
ever, largely their very subservience to 
a rule of law, unformulated, unwritten, 
the existence of which is therefore large- 
ly unsuspected, but none the less real, 
that makes them break the formulated, 



l6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

written law of adult life when, as so often 
happens, it runs counter to their own. 
So it can occur that in the college the 
student often appears as the natural 
enemy of all set rule and regulation, 
while she is really influenced in every 
act of her daily life by the stringent law 
of the " college-spirit," which acts, not 
by definitely prescribed punishment or 
reward for a definite act, but by an 
equally effective process of suppression 
or encouragement, carried on by the 
subtle suggestion of look, tone, and gen- 
eral attitude on the part of the group. 

The lessons that the college-group 
teaches are, in the main, wholesome 
ones. In the first place, by its own 
intolerance, it opens the way to toler- 
ance and a wider view of things on the 
part of its individual member. Its first 



FOR WOMEN. 17 

work, preparatory to teaching its own 
special lessons, is to crack the shell of 
personal prejudice and local peculiarity, 
showing the student that her standard is 
not that absolute canon of truth and 
propriety she may have thought it. It 
frowns upon eccentricity, and a desire 
to make one's self conspicuous. It 
shows its member that within the group- 
limits are other individuals of other per- 
sonal and local traits than her own, 
whom the group values quite as highly 
as it does her. Social and local distinc- 
tions being thus made subordinate to the 
one purpose of constraining conformity 
to a "college-type," the individual may 
learn to think of them as relative and 
transitory in other relations, and will 
begin to recognize and value the fun- 
damental traits of our common human- 
ity in their persistence and force. 



1 8 COLLEGE TRAINING 

Having cleared the ground of all ob- 
stacles of individual peculiarity, the 
group proceeds to its own positive les- 
sons. It teaches its member not to 
put her own private interest above the 
interests of the group. She is not al- 
lowed to ignore its calls ; she is made 
ashamed of preferring her own ease to 
its benefit. In all her comings and 
goings, in all her acts and words, she 
must have regard to the dignity and 
decorum of the group as represented in 
her person ; she must preserve its honor 
untarnished, whatever her own private 
temptations or occasions to do otherwise. 
Thus is encouraged a spirit of devotion 
to a common cause, and a forgetfulness 
of self, that are most wholesome ele- 
ments in the matured character. 

It indirectly inculcates courtesy and 



FOR WOMEN. 19 

respect for the feelings of others ; no 
one member of the group may be al- 
lowed to assert herself unpleasantly 
against the others, although, as express- 
ing group feeling and opinion, she may 
be alarmingly frank and direct in re- 
proof and criticism. In general it dis- 
countenances sham, and respects and 
admires the genuine and real ; but, since 
it is human, it is not always infallible 
in detecting the one and the other. It 
tends to elevate the standard of appear- 
ance, behavior, and manner, from the 
fact that it lays down as a type, not the 
traits actually shown in its members, 
but those that it likes and fancies. The 
crowd, as a crowd, is quick to condemn 
in any one of its members an act, a 
manner, a way of speech, that any other 
member, singly, might be not at all 



20 COLLEGE TRAINING 

disinclined to manifest in her own per- 
son. 

The strong character will develop a 
greater and more assured strength in its 
contact with the college-group, since it 
must justify its own worthiness to exist 
at every step of the way ; the weak char- 
acter will find itself benefited by its en- 
deavor to conform to the college-type, 
which is somewhat above the level of 
the average girl, since it expresses, not 
the sum of actual traits and characters 
of the individuals making up the group, 
but the group-ideal. 

While the group is thus powerful in 
its influence over the individual member, 
it is itself subject to influence. The 
leading traits above indicated charac- 
terize it pretty constantly, because the 
college-group, wherever and however sit- 



FOR WOMEN. 21 

uated, is a group of the young ; yet in 
the details of its character it is modi- 
fied by the character of its elements and 
the nature of its surroundings. Each 
separate college-group has its own dis- 
tinctive personal traits, due to its own 
peculiar position and circumstances. 
The personality of the Western college- 
group differs from that of the Eastern, 
that of the Northern from that of the 
Southern ; its physiognomy is different 
in the coeducational college from what 
it is in the college for women only. The 
college-group in the town will be more 
careful of the small proprieties of life 
than the college-group in the country ; 
the college-group housed in dormitories 
will exercise more control over its mem- 
bers than the college-group that is dis- 
persed every night. 



22 COLLEGE TRAINING 

The individual member, although un- 
der the sway of the group, influences it 
in turn. If one could decide what char- 
acteristics or qualities make the leader 
in the college-group, one could perhaps 
penetrate the secret of the demagogue, 
the popular orator, or the "magnetic" 
politician. The "popular girl" often 
has much to do in giving the last forma- 
tive touches to the distinctive social type 
dominant in the college at the moment ; 
but what is it that makes her the " popu- 
lar girl ? " She will naturally, to greater 
or less extent, express in her own person 
that unformulated ideal of the group, 
the characteristics of which we have just 
been trying to outline ; but added to this 
is some trick of personality, some idio- 
syncrasy, that catches the group fancy, 
and sets them all to admiring, imitating, 



FOR WOMEN. 23 

and following. Not often, but occasion- 
ally, the group is influenced, not through 
its taste and feelings, but through its 
reason, by some member in it of strong 
mind and determination. In general, 
however, the group can be led by its 
member but a very little way, and that 
only by one that has already a strong 
hold on its feelings and preferences. 

Another influence that goes to mould 
the group-character is the governing 
body of the college, and this is a power- 
ful one ; for it is theirs to determine the 
outer conditions in which the group is 
to work, and it is also theirs to come 
even more closely into relation with the 
group-life. By "governing body" is 
not meant necessarily the legally consti- 
tuted and nominal guides and directors 
of the institution, but the real centre of 



24 COLLEGE TRAINING 

power, whether board of trustees, com- 
mittee of the faculty, dean of a school, 
or president, — the source from which 
comes all actual direction of college af- 
fairs, and to which must be referred all 
real responsibility for their management. 
They have it largely in their power to 
give the tone, the form, and the direction 
to the college-spirit, and thus to enter 
into one of the strongest influences in the 
college. They can to a great extent de- 
termine whether the college-ideal shall 
be comparatively low or comparatively 
high, whether the natural proneness of 
the young group to the outward and vis- 
ible shall be encouraged to its highest 
pitch, whether its natural taste for rite 
and ceremony and the proprieties shall 
altogether outweigh its equally natural 
feeling for the real and true and genu- 



FOR WOMEN. 25 

ine beneath all outward forms. Their 
influence upon the student as an indi- 
vidual may be also great. They can 
set the seal of approval upon a me- 
chanical scholarship, a tricky method, 
and a material success, or upon the liv- 
ing power of the mind, the straightest 
integrity in all dealings, and a success 
that cannot be measured by "marks," 
"grades," or fellowships. 

In summing up the results of the col- 
lege discipline, we may say that we look 
to the college to give its students, by 
direct teaching, some command of fact 
and some idea of a method. It teaches 
indirectly a more or less perfect code of 
morals and manners, different from that 
taught in the community in some re- 
spects, and in some respects better and 
higher. 



26 COLLEGE TRAINING 

There is much besides that the college 
does not and cannot do, that is, never- 
theless, expected of it. A common de- 
mand is, that the college shall implant 
by direct teaching what it now teaches 
indirectly. Proposals have been made 
from time to time that the colleges should 
establish chairs of manners, chairs of 
moral advice, chairs of preparation for 
wifehood and motherhood, chairs of in- 
struction in dress, in polite letter-writing, 
and so on. The demand is unreason- 
able, since human nature will never be 
taught those things in that way. Man- 
ners and morals are not matters of defi- 
nition and command, but of assimilation 
and imitation. 

One of our unfounded expectations 
from the wide diffusion of college train- 
ing is of a great and general increase in 



FOR WOMEN. 27 

originative mental power. Under the 
proper discipline any given individual 
will find himself acquiring more com- 
plete possession and use of the powers 
with which nature endowed him at birth ; 
but experience seems to show that no 
amount of training can add to that ori- 
ginal stock. It is a common complaint 
that with the increase in attendance at 
our woman's colleges, there is no cor- 
responding increase in original mental 
product. The same may be said of the 
college for men. Mankind seems to be 
pretty constantly divided into the rela- 
tively small class of the inventive-minded, 
the relatively great class of the adoptive- 
or imitative-minded, while below both is 
a deficient class, which must always be 
smaller than the two upper classes if so- 
ciety is to hold together, which will not 



28 COLLEGE TRAINING 

or cannot either imitate or invent. It is 
the first class that produces great and 
original work for the delight and instruc- 
tion of mankind ; and unfortunately its 
limits are so narrow that any consider- 
able extension of educational opportu- 
nities is sure to pass far beyond them. 
It is the inevitable result, then, that 
original production falls proportionately 
behind the spread of education. The 
good, however, done by education is 
none the less real. The college may 
never make genius out of mediocrity; 
but it is no small nor worthless achieve- 
ment to enable mediocrity to appreciate 
and make use of the fruits of genius. 

Another unfounded expectation is, that 
the college can turn out a uniform pro- 
duct in its graduates, notwithstanding 
the differences and deficiencies in home 



FOR WOMEN. 29 

and school training. The college grad- 
uate is supposed by the community to 
be possessed of a definite amount of 
learning and culture by the mere fact of 
passing four years under college train- 
ing. The college graduate is in reality 
the product of two sets of forces, — the 
character and acquirements she comes 
to the college with on the one hand, and 
the influences of the college-life on the 
other : each is equally determinate of 
the product. If habits of indolence, 
selfishness, intolerance, and narrowness 
of view have been encouraged at home, 
the influences of college-life have just 
so much the more to contend against; 
if the home and the immediate sur- 
roundings have failed to give the stu- 
dent the beginnings of acquaintance 
with the fine, the beautiful, and the 



30 COLLEGE TRAINING 

liberal in life, the college has just so 
much the more to supply. If the stu- 
dent comes ill-trained and untrained 
from the preparatory school, other con- 
ditions being equal, the college cannot 
do so much for her as for her well-trained 
classmate. 

Great as the influence of the college 
is, it cannot do everything. It cannot, 
apparently, add to the brain capital of 
the individual ; it can only help to a 
better use of it. It cannot supply ev- 
erything left unprovided by home and 
school ; it can only begin where they 
leave off, and go as far as time will al- 
low it in erecting its structure. It can- 
not create character out and out by rule 
and precept ; it can only form and guide 
it by spirit and example. 



FOR WOMEN. 31 

CHAPTER II. 

THE PREPARATION. 

AS the mental and moral outfit a stu- 
-t~V- dent possesses when she enters 
the college has so much to do with her 
after success there, it will be found as 
desirable to make provision for suitable 
preparatory training as to secure for the 
student the advantages and opportuni- 
ties of the college itself. A fruitful sub- 
ject of discussion is the outer form and 
method of that preparation, — how many 
subjects shall be covered in the prepar- 
atory school; how much time shall be 
given to each, and in what relative pro- 
portion ; what may the colleges properly 
require in their entrance examinations ; 



32 COLLEGE TRAINING 

what steps should be taken toward uni- 
formity of standard in entrance require- 
ment? While we are waiting, however, 
for the well-organized and perfected ed- 
ucational system that is hoped for as 
the result of the researches and labors 
of our professional educators, may not 
something be done, under actually ex- 
isting conditions of college and school 
machinery, toward making the prepara- 
tion for college not only effective for the 
purpose it is meant to serve, but a nat- 
ural and pleasant process for the student 
who undertakes it ? 

In this work both home and school 
may find something to do, and home 
and school must act in harmony in their 
task. Parents in our country are in- 
clined to think that they, personally, 
can do little toward their children's edu- 



FOR WOMEN. 33 

cation. They are, in many cases, try- 
ing to secure for their children much 
more of educational advantage than they 
themselves have enjoyed ; and so, in the 
feeling of helplessness that arises as the 
child gets farther and farther away from 
them in the path of learning, they turn 
all matters of its education over to the 
paid teacher, especially trained for the 
task, as the only possible source of in- 
struction. 

Even to the teacher, however, parents 
do not grant full power and control in 
those matters. A common preposses- 
sion of the parent is that the child is 
of a rare and unusual nature, which is 
manifested either in a supposed native 
brilliancy that is more than a match 
even for the teacher's powers, or in a 
sensitive temperament so peculiar in its 



34 COLLEGE TRAINING 

gifts that the teacher does not under- 
stand it or sympathize with it. There 
is also an impression afloat that the 
play of mind is an exhausting and dan- 
gerous process in itself, which will con- 
sume the unfortunate victim to the habit 
like a raging fire, if allowed to gain full 
headway. 

The result of all this is, that the pre- 
paratory teacher too often finds that he 
has to deal with a child untaught and 
undisciplined at home, who feels above 
the necessity of discipline at all, who is 
taken out of school early and sent back 
late, who is excused on frequent occa- 
sions for health's sake, and, when at 
home, is enticed from lessons at every 
opportunity. So thoughtless, indeed, 
and so apparently lacking in all notion 
of what is useful and proper in the 



FOR WOMEN. 35 

school discipline, is the average parent, 
that the teacher dreads the idea of co- 
operation, and asks only to be let alone 
in his work. If, however, parents could 
and would co-operate with the teacher 
properly, the results would be far be- 
yond what are generally secured now. 
Parents can be of assistance in the 
process of the child's education, though 
they may know little or nothing of the 
technical detail of its studies. In the 
first place, the parent is responsible for 
the child's character, a factor that en- 
ters largely even into purely intellec- 
tual progress. It will make a great dif- 
ference with the child's advancement in 
the school, as well as in life in general, 
whether it has or has not been taught 
a regard for duty and discipline, and a 
respect for the opinions of those who 



2,6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

are older, and know more than it does. 
The parent, and especially the mother, 
can establish habits of order, of obedi- 
ence, and of truthfulness ; she can teach 
a disregard of petty aches and pains 
that will tend to build up in the child a 
sturdy manliness or womanliness ; she 
can turn the child's mind away from it- 
self as the chief centre of interest, — the 
first requisite, perhaps, to a true mental 
and moral growth. The child may learn 
from her that effort is the natural con- 
dition of life ; that mental effort is no 
abnormal and dangerous process, but a 
normal and healthful one, and that noth- 
ing really good may be expected without 
effort, either mental or physical. None 
of these lessons may be left entirely to 
be taught by paid teachers ; the task is 
beyond their power and province to ac- 
complish. 



FOR WOMEN. 37 

Any parent of average common-sense 
and good intention, whether " well edu- 
cated " in the conventional sense or 
not, can do much even for the strictly 
intellectual development of the child. 
The mother is with the child through 
those early years when mind and mus- 
cle, all a-tingle with expanding power, 
reach out on every side in very wanton- 
ness of unspent energy, trying, expe- 
riencing, and co-ordinating, until the 
random play of mental and physical 
activity is reduced to the orderly, pur- 
poseful system of thought and expres- 
sion. The habits of mental action that 
are formed during this process show 
their influence for good or evil through- 
out life. It is consequently a most 
important function that the mother has 
to perform, coming before the work of 



38 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the teacher in point of time, and of 
relative value also, — to guide and di- 
rect this process so that it may have 
its best effect. The important matter 
in this guidance is to make the child's 
mind do its own work, and thus gain 
a strength and vigor that the supported 
mind, like the bandaged muscle, never 
can acquire. 

After the child has learned to talk, a 
great part of this tentative and plan- 
less mental activity shows itself in the 
form of asking innumerable questions. 
" What is this ? " " What is that for ? " 
" What makes this do so ? " are often- 
repeated queries by means of which 
the child tries to adjust itself to a new 
and untried world. If not properly con- 
trolled, however, this mode of activity 
becomes a more random and aimless 



FOR WOMEN. 39 

play of mind than it began, degenerat- 
ing into a well-known affliction that we 
may call the " question habit ; " which, 
far from being the sign of exceptional 
mental activity and health parents usu- 
ally imagine it, is in reality a symptom 
of disease, — a species of mental influ- 
enza, betokening a mind too flabby and 
nerveless to set up the proper reactions 
within itself. 

While the easy-going or over-busy 
parent turns the little questioner off 
with flimsy or evasive answers, or no 
answers at all, the conscientious parent 
thinks his or her whole duty is done 
when the child's questions are, each one, 
answered faithfully, seriously, and as 
fully as the child's comprehension will 
permit. This is not, however, the full 
extent of the parent's duty. Not merely 



40 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the answers to the questions, but the 
questions themselves, should be care- 
fully attended to. No foolish question 
should be allowed ; no question that the 
child, with the aid of what it knows 
already, should be able to answer for it- 
self ; none without a purpose beyond the 
joy of hearing its own tongue clatter. 

The child thus trained in its ques- 
tionings, as well as instructed in the 
answers given to them, comes very soon 
to learn the difference between the rea- 
sonable and the unreasonable, the rele- 
vant and the irrelevant, the important 
and the trivial ; it learns to value what 
is told to it once, and will stow away 
carefully for future use any bit of in- 
formation that it gets, if there is a fairly 
clear certainty that that information will 
not be freely supplied again the next 



FOR WOMEN. 41 

time an idle fancy suggests, but will 
not fully picture the matter in question. 
The child learns also to apply what it 
does know in matters that it does not 
know fully, when it is forbidden to 
ask for help until it has worked at the 
problem in earnest with the materials 
already at hand. 

In this way the child learns to carry 
on a true process of thought, which is 
not the disconnected flow of casually 
suggested mental images that frequently 
passes for thought even in the adult 
mind, but is the orderly working out of 
a power of making distinctions between 
things, of connecting them one to an- 
other, and of applying what one has 
learned about one set of things to an- 
other set, that makes its possessor really 
know the world, and how to use it. 



42 COLLEGE TRAINING 

The cultivation of this power of 
thought is one of the greatest aids the 
parent can render the teacher in the 
work of college preparation ; for when 
this is secured, the rest will come with- 
out difficulty, and as a matter of course. 
It is unfortunately the fact that the 
average membership of our schools is 
made up of girls and boys who have 
not been taught at home or anywhere 
else really to think. A girl of this 
type will read her Latin and Greek 
texts without one glimmering of a 
notion that they are the expression of 
some fellow-being's actual thoughts 
about actual things ; she will feel no 
compunction in slaying a man in one 
line only to represent him as begin- 
ning a speech in the next, or in mak- 
ing the victorious general turn in head- 



FOR WOMEN 43 

long flight over the bridge that has just 
been razed to its foundations. Under 
such conditions, is it any wonder that 
college-preparatory teaching is often 
such an ungrateful and exhausting task ? 
As the child grows older, and be- 
gins its school-life, the parent may 
do much to help the teacher by con- 
tinuing the general discipline of the 
thinking powers already begun in ear- 
lier years. To say that parents should 
keep up an active intellectual life in 
the home may have a formidable sound, 
as implying that parents must spend 
their time in discussing deep prob- 
lems of philosophy, criticising great 
works of art and literature, and deliv- 
ering opinions upon new developments 
in science ; it need simply mean this, 
— that parents should think over and 



44 COLLEGE TRAINING 

discuss " in the n,earmg of • their chil- 
dren, and with them, matters of broader 
interest than mere personal gossip. 
The way the common-sense business 
man, or the practical woman, takes up 
a concrete case, looks over the cir- 
cumstances, considers the details, re- 
gards all the aspects and bearings of 
it, is a valuable teaching in itself for 
the child, who learns by it that not all 
the problems are within book-covers, 
and that hard thinking may be em- 
ployed on matters outside of school 
as well as in it. What is set down 
in books was got in the first place by 
some such process of talking over and 
thinking over things as is gone through 
in every-day life, and it is most useful 
to the child to get an inkling of the fact. 
Parents should also pay some atten- 



FOR WOMEN. 45 

tion to the child's habits of reading. 
It is usually thought quite remarkable 
and wonderful if the child spends its 
time in reading at all. The parent 
perhaps, as well as the child, should 
be taught to know that not all wisdom 
is contained in books, and that not all 
that is in the books is wisdom. "The 
child is so fond of reading ! " audibly 
whispers the proud mother when the 
visitor comes in and finds the child 
immersed in the volume of fairy-tales. 
Soon the child, who has been follow- 
ing simply and unconsciously the nat- 
ural impulse of childhood for the 
entertainment afforded by a story, be- 
comes puffed up with the conscious- 
ness of unusual merit and distinction 
in reading any sort of a book in any 
sort of a way. 



46 COLLEGE TRAINING 

As far as any real advantage to mind 
and thought is concerned, much of the 
reading done by children might bet- 
ter be omitted altogether. Particularly 
pernicious is the enervating and taste- 
less pap usually offered to children 
under the name of "juvenile litera- 
ture," which, with its commonplace 
treatment of commonplace themes, its 
presentation of the child to itself as a 
hero, its preoccupation with the imma- 
ture stage of life and thought, deals 
with the child on its own level merely, 
ill exercising the child's mind in real 
power of thought, and ill preparing 
it for maturity. The reading given to 
children should always be of a quality 
sufficiently high to afford the adult 
mind entertainment or nourishment. 
There need be no fear that such read- 



FOR WOMEN. 47 

ing will be beyond the child's compre- 
hension. The normal child is far keener 
to appreciate and understand the best 
in literature than is commonly sup- 
posed, and should have it as a neces- 
sary part of training. A background of 
good literature, absorbed at home not 
as a task but as a spontaneously sought 
pleasure, gives that touch of distinction, 
that breadth and ease, that denote cul- 
ture, and that are painfully lacking in 
the average student. 

The most unlearned parent may co- 
operate with the work of the teacher by 
regulating the home-life so that the girl 
preparing for college may have fixed 
and certain periods of time to devote to 
her work, during which she is no more 
to be called upon for the performance 
of social and domestic duties than if she 



48 COLLEGE TRAINING 

were living somewhere else. It is too 
commonly the idea that the daughter of 
the family is family property; and any 
seclusion of herself is looked upon as a 
selfish withdrawal from the family life. 
If, however, the girl is going to college, 
the time to be spent in preparation must 
be counted as part of the cost. Let the 
girl, then, be quite undisturbed in her 
hours of work, and let her be expected 
and required to put forth real effort dur- 
ing them. Outside of these hours the 
parent must see that the daughter has 
sufficient out-of-door exercise to keep 
her body in good working condition, 
and sufficient social life and amusement 
of a simple sort to give her some relax- 
ation and elasticity of mind. 

If the mother only thinks so, she may 
follow the girl even more closely in her 



FOR WOMEN. 49 

school progress. If she will cast aside 
the old superstition that restricts the 
period of learning to youth, she may 
acquire some knowledge of the techni- 
cal detail of what her daughter is study- 
ing, and may help her, even if only by 
trying to learn something from her. 
There is no better way to learn a thing 
one's self than by trying to teach it to 
another ; and the girl's effort to tell 
what she is doing, and to explain what 
she knows, will be a great help to her 
in her own effort to know it. 

Any parent may find a way to assist 
in her daughter's advancement by com- 
ing into sympathetic personal relations 
with the teacher. The mother should 
be acquainted with those who teach her 
daughter, and should know something 
of their methods and motives. Where 



50 COLLEGE TRAINING 

these are good, she may help through 
her comprehension of them, by keeping 
them present before her daughter's 
mind ; where these are bad or indiffer- 
ent (and where she cannot change con- 
ditions for the better) she may skilfully 
counteract them by corrections and ad- 
ditions of her own, to be made, however, 
without lowering the teacher in the stu- 
dent's eyes any more than regard for 
obvious truth and justice warrants. 

A girl properly helped and disciplined 
at home will, if of average ability, make 
a fairly good college preparation in 
almost any school, and under almost 
any teacher. Unfortunately, thoroughly 
good home-training is rare ; and even 
if it were not, it is still desirable that 
thoroughly good teaching at school 
should supplement it. This is not to 



FOR WOMEN. 51 

be found exclusively in large and well- 
advertised schools, under elaborately de- 
vised methods, with all the parapher- 
nalia of the new science of pedagogy, 
nor is it invariably to be found under 
such conditions. It depends, as it al- 
ways has depended, and always will 
depend, on the native mental force of 
the teacher, who will be able to use a 
method to advantage if there is one, and 
to invent one if none existed before. 
No amount of technical acquirement 
possessed by the teacher, and no de- 
gree of mechanical correspondence to a 
standard, can take the place of this ori- 
ginal power of mind. 

The teaching staff in the successful 
preparatory school must, then, be made 
up of persons considerable for real men- 
tal ability ; and to secure such persons, 



52 COLLEGE TRAINING 

adequate salaries must be paid. There 
is no escape from the fact that educa- 
tion, like almost all other good things, 
is expensive. It involves expenditure of 
money and effort on the part of the par- 
ent, of time and effort on the part of the 
teacher. In order that persons of 
the high grade of ability desirable in 
the teacher should be induced to occupy 
that position, they should be offered at 
least as much as they might expect to 
earn, with their intellectual capital, in 
other and perhaps less exhausting fields. 
Day by day the opportunities of prof- 
itable employment for the educated man 
and the educated woman are widening ; 
day by day the expense of preparing for 
the teacher's profession grows greater, 
with the daily growth of requirement for 
that profession. The standard of re- 



FOR WOMEN. 53 

ward for the teacher must be raised cor- 
respondingly, unless we want the best 
minds to leave that most important post 
to the unenterprising and incompetent, 
who feel that they would be failures at 
anything else. 

The harm that the second-rate pre- 
paratory teacher can do is great. Such 
a teacher acts under the idea, and con- 
veys it in turn to the pupil, that the 
aim of the preparatory discipline is to 
give a training in a difficult game, to be 
played later with the college examiner, 
in which the winner is the one who se- 
cures for his side the highest number 
of the ten "tricks" or questions set in 
the examination paper. Teaching, with 
such a person, means drill in the rules 
of the game by means of papers set 
by former examiners, and study means 



54 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the cramming of special sets of facts 
and catches that are likely to win extra 
points for the student in the game. 
This devouring of great masses of ma- 
terial at top speed, under feverish anxi- 
ety to cram down and keep in as much 
as possible, is as far as can be from the 
true method and purpose of education, 
and gives a poor preliminary notion of 
the college spirit and influence. 

The first-rate teacher, on the other 
hand, tries primarily to train the pow- 
ers, letting the acquirements, to some 
extent, take care of themselves. In 
carrying out this general plan, he will- 
not hesitate to spend what may appear 
at first glance too long a time over 
points that especially puzzle or espe- 
cially interest the pupil. One problem 
worked out thoroughly in all its bear- 



FOR WOMEN. 55 

ings, one question of interest followed 
out in all its applications and variations, 
is a valuable first lesson in command of 
thought and in original research, that 
will make the solution of future prob- 
lems, and the investigation of future 
cases, easy and natural to the student, 
as the superficial and mechanical cover- 
ing of dozens of topics could not do. 
Where even one thing has been well 
and thoroughly thought out, an ease is 
gained in dealing with all subsequent 
matters that more than makes up for 
the apparent delay. 

A pupil taught in this way, and of 
average ability, need not be afraid of 
any entrance examination paper ever 
set, even when she has not made spe- 
cial preparation for it. In her answers 
to the questions asked she cannot help 



56 COLLEGE TRAINING 

showing intelligence, even if she fail 
in some small points ; and it is intelli- 
gence, above all, that the college is try- 
ing to test, and welcomes, when found, 
with great rejoicing. 

It may be suggested, that to this gen- 
eral preparation, a little good, hard 
cramming may be added, with no inju- 
rious results whatever. The mischief 
arises when cramming is the only form 
of preparation. On many occasions in 
life, there is a call for the exercise of 
just this " cramming " faculty, — the 
power to take into the mind, with rapid- 
ity and certainty, large masses of detail 
for temporary and special use. Mere 
memory is a plodding beast of burden 
indeed, but under the direction of in- 
telligence, it has its valuable uses ; and 
the growing modern tendency to ignore 



FOR WOMEN. 57 

memory and its function will, if per- 
sisted in, deprive the actively working 
mind of one of its best aids. 

In preparatory work, hurry is a great 
source of fatigue and discouragement. 
With the innocent egotism of youth, the 
average school-girl is convinced that 
life in its real sense is over at twenty- 
five, and that the unfortunate beings 
who have passed that period are merely 
existing because they have to. How 
she laughs at the bare-faced pretence 
that the single woman of thirty-five may 
have her friends, her admirers even, 
and a sense of the tide of life as full 
and exhilarating as she felt it at eigh- 
teen. And yet modern conditions are 
slowly moving forward the barrier be- 
tween youth and age. Wider and more 
complicated activities demand a longer 



58 COLLEGE TRAINING 

period of preparation before engaging 
in them, and a continued process of 
adjustment and readjustment, which 
means continued learning, in carrying 
them on. The modern novel reflects 
this changing state of things ; the old- 
time heroine of bewitching sixteen has 
grown into fascinating thirty, or even 
forty. But the school-girl has not come 
to realize this condition of affairs as 
yet, and tries with all her energy to 
have the school-days, and even the 
much-desired college days, over before 
the period of what she looks upon as 
real life ends. 

The girl of fifteen or sixteen consid- 
ers much more carefully the spending 
of an extra year or so on a task or in a 
way of life than she will ten years later. 
To enter college at nineteen when one 



FOR WOMEN. 59 

could crowd in at eighteen seems to 
her an inexcusable waste of precious 
time and a real calamity. The aver- 
age mother is only too prone to fall 
in with these ideas, and wish to shorten 
the years devoted to study, even when 
she does not provide at home for the 
best and most effective use of those 
she is willing to allow. Even what she 
takes out of the middle of the school- 
time she is not ready to add on to the 
end. Some teachers, too, lend them- 
selves to the carrying out of these 
plans, and, giving themselves up to the 
dominant thought of hurry, in the spirit 
of the race-track, fit their pupils, like 
trotters, to make the fastest time on 
record. 

Nothing could be worse for the stu- 
dent. The mind is like the limb the 



60 COLLEGE TRAINING 

athlete is trying to develop, — it may 
be provided with all the nourishment 
you please, it may be exercised with 
daily diligence ; but if food and exer- 
cise are supplied faster than nature 
can make use of them in her leisurely 
processes of growth, the one will be 
merely a clog, the other a weariness to 
it. 

The student who is rushed through 
her college preparation at top speed 
may succeed in getting into college well 
enough; but once in, she is likely to 
find herself with a mind too fatigued 
and inelastic to leap as it should to its 
task with the fresh and spontaneous 
interest that attaches and holds to it- 
self all that belongs to it. She will 
also be lacking, probably, in the gen- 
eral culture so important as a prepara- 



FOR WOMEN. 6l 

tion for the best influences of college 
life, — a culture that can be obtained 
only by a little leisure from a constant 
grind of school-tasks to give opportu- 
nity for some familiarity with the best 
in literature, art, and music. 

Hurrying through the preparatory 
school in this way, the student is usu- 
ally able to cover the mechanical re- 
quirements for entrance to college some 
little time before general intelligence 
and character are mature enough to 
allow her to make the best use of col- 
lege advantages. She may, for ex- 
ample, be able to analyze every word 
and sentence in her Greek and Latin 
texts, and yet be totally unfit, from 
lack of maturity, to learn what Greek 
and Roman thought really meant, as 
the college tries to teach it to her. It 



62 COLLEGE TRAINING 

seems a pity to lose the best good of 
those valuable years of college disci- 
pline just by over-haste in beginning 
them ! 

Some maturity of character as well 
is desirable in the pupil who is to be 
sent away from the safeguards of home. 
It is a bad thing for the student, and 
a desperately bad thing for the college 
and its influence, that she should be 
turned loose there with the natural 
impulses of youth untrained and un- 
repressed. Perhaps even before the 
necessity of intellectual maturity for 
the girl leaving home for the college 
comes the necessity of firmly grounded 
habits of self-control, caution, and self- 
respect. 

In conclusion we may say, that while 
college preparation should be made a 



FOR WOMEN. 63 

natural process, it never can be made 
an entirely easy one. The student 
must work, and work hard. The " read- 
ing without tears" of the kindergarten 
will not altogether accomplish the re- 
sult. But the effort itself, if made 
under the right guidance and in the 
right spirit, becomes, like the strong 
play of the athlete's muscle, a pleasure 
greater than the dawdler and the idler 
can ever know. 



64 COLLEGE TRAINING 

CHAPTER III. 

CHOOSING A COLLEGE. 

A MO ST fascinating and at the same 
time bewildering occupation is 
the study of college catalogues. This 
is a study in which the girl is apt to be 
a greater adept than her parents. She 
can tell you without faltering just what 
books of Vergil, Homer, and Cicero 
each college requires for admission, just 
what the " group-system " is, and what 
is the scope of "electives." The par- 
ent is likely to become so puzzled over 
the intricacies of the matter as to turn 
it over entirely to the daughter, leaving 
her to decide where she shall spend 
four of the most important and inter- 
esting years of her life. 



FOR WOMEN. 65 

But the parent should know, distinctly 
and definitely, what sort of a place the 
daughter is going to ; and this knowl- 
edge must be extracted not only from 
the college programme, but from all 
possible sources besides. The college 
programme contains those bare items of 
information about the college that are 
to be expressed in definite facts and 
figures, and something may be learned 
from these, even if they are taken sep- 
arately, just as they stand, as the ordi- 
nary reader would take them ; but much 
more is to be learned by reading one 
statement in the light of another, by 
combining and relating to one another 
all the conditions described, until one 
is able to look behind the nominal offer 
made by the college to the real advan- 
tage given. 



66 COLLEGE TRAINING 

From the programme the parent may 
learn whether the standard of entrance 
is high or low. It may be found that 
the college sets its standard apparently 
high in requiring examinations for en- 
trance in advanced subjects, and in 
many of them ; it may, on the other 
hand, be found that although the sub- 
jects themselves are advanced, the 
ground to be covered in each is a small 
proportion of the whole. Again, the 
subjects required may be advanced, and 
the amount to be taken in them may 
be considerable, and yet the privilege of 
entering by certificate and under condi- 
tions may be so liberally offered by the 
college as to show that its real standard 
of entrance is lower than it appears to 
be. 

What the student is to receive by 



FOR WOMEN. 67 

direct instruction is laid down in the 
printed course of study, and more or 
less information is given there about 
the instructors and their methods. 
Here, too, much more may be learned 
by combining the statements made than 
by considering each one singly. The 
college may propose, for example, to 
give instruction in a certain great de- 
partment of knowledge, while the defi- 
nite courses marked out to be given in 
it may be so few in number, may cover 
so little of the subject, and may occupy 
so little time, that the real opportunities 
offered for study in that general direc- 
tion may be small indeed. Again, am- 
ple courses of study may be laid out, 
covering nominally the whole field of 
one great subject, while a reference to 
the faculty-list may show that only one 



68 COLLEGE TRAINING 

person is set to conduct a broad and 
diversified work that would require a 
large staff of instructors for its accom- 
plishment. 

Sometimes it will be found that one 
person is carrying on work in two de- 
partments, a tolerably good indication 
that neither the college nor the in- 
structor understands what modern spe- 
cialization means ; or if the college and 
the instructor do understand it, they are 
not able to live up to its requirements. 
Again, it may be found that a crowded 
faculty-list, giving several or many work- 
ers in a single subject, will be overbal- 
anced by a still more crowded student- 
list. In such a case, classes are likely 
to be too large to receive proper care 
and instruction. 

Perhaps the college is connected with 



FOR WOMEN. 69 

a preparatory school. It must then be 
considered whether a nominally large 
teaching-force in the college is not 
obliged to employ so much of its time in 
the work of the school that the strictly 
collegiate work is insufficiently provided 
for. The student-list of the associated 
school, too, may be found to be so large 
in comparison with the membership of 
the college, that true collegiate life and 
spirit cannot exist. 

Study of the catalogue will usually re- 
veal something of the material resources 
of the college. To be successful in 
keeping up with the advance of modern 
thought, the modern college must have 
a generous equipment ; it must have 
suitable and substantial buildings in 
which to house its students without 
over-crowding and danger to health ; it 



JO COLLEGE TRAINING 

must provide the library, the observa- 
tory, the laboratories, the ample store 
of apparatus, and the other materials 
necessary to enable the student to gain 
that familiarity with real things, in their 
changes and qualities, that gives sub- 
stance and actuality to the bare outlines 
of the text-book and the lecture. 

It is well to look carefully into such 
information as is given in the college 
programme about its instructors. We 
may learn from this more or less about 
their previous training and experience ; 
whether they hold college degrees or 
not, and of what grade ; whether the 
degrees are bestowed as honorary titles 
by small and insignificant institutions, 
or as the reward of actual work done 
in some high-class university, either here 
or abroad. We may perhaps learn 



FOR WOMEN. 71 

whether the names on the faculty-list 
are distinguished in any way. Admit- 
ting that the original discoverer, the 
brilliant writer, the strong mover in so- 
cial affairs, may not necessarily be the 
best or most useful teacher, we have yet 
no warrant for supposing, conversely, 
that the great mass of the unknown will 
teach the better for their obscurity. It 
is a sign of life in the college, and 
promises well for its work with the stu- 
dent, that it has within its walls men 
and women of sufficient power to have 
had influence in the world of thought 
outside the little circle of the single 
college or university. Such persons as 
these, whether " good teachers " in the 
technical and professional sense or not, 
at least give tone to the college, and set 
a standard of achievement that is good 
to have before the student. 



72 COLLEGE TRAINING 

When the resources of the catalogue 
are exhausted, perhaps the most impor- 
tant part of the work still remains to be 
done ; that is, personal inspection of 
the college, and personal contact with 
the influences there. The innocent 
embellishment in description and por- 
traiture of buildings and general outer 
conditions, so natural and so excusable 
in the prospectus, even that of a col- 
lege, must be corrected by actual view 
of the place itself. 

It must be known definitely and accu- 
rately that the physical basis of life in 
the college is thoroughly provided for ; 
since, if this basis is not sound and 
firm, the mental structure will be totter- 
ing and insecure. Much has been said 
against the higher education for women, 
on the ground that the mental labor 



FOR WOMEN. 73 

involved was too severe a strain upon 
the physical organization. Results of 
careful investigation show, that in cases 
of invalidism arising during and after 
college-life, the actual exertion of study 
was responsible for little, almost none, 
of the mischief. The student who is 
well housed, well provided with means 
of exercise, and, above all, well fed, 
need not be afraid, unless in excep- 
tional cases, of bringing discredit to the 
higher education of women by break- 
ing down in the middle of her college 
course. 

The conditions of dormitory life 
should be carefully looked into. The 
old notion that girls could be crowded 
together in groups of from two to five 
in one sleeping-room is now very gen- 
erally given up. Provision is made in 



74 COLLEGE TRAINING 

our best women's colleges that each stu- 
dent shall have a bed to herself, and in 
many places she is the sole occupant of 
her bedroom. The ideal state of things 
is where the student has a bedroom and 
study for herself ; but she should at 
least have the privacy of a bedroom as 
a necessary condition of real rest and 
repair of nerve-power. 

It is also desirable that the student's 
room should be heated by an open fire, 
and lighted, during part of the day at 
least, by the direct rays of the sun. 
The influence of these two elements in 
keeping up the general fund of health 
and vitality is estimated far under its 
real importance, because its working is 
gradual, and its results a generally dif- 
fused condition of well-being rather 
than a sudden improvement in any one 
faculty or function. 



FOR WOMEN. 75 

Deprived of sunlight, the human be- 
ing, like the plant, seems to lose some- 
thing of its active powers of growth 
and renewal. The girl in the sunless 
room begins to feel tired and unac- 
countably depressed under her burden 
of work, and finds herself falling an 
easy prey to colds, coughs, and various 
other ailments. The room heated by 
steam or furnace heat only, does not af- 
ford the thorough ventilation so neces- 
sary for the pleasant and easy working 
of the brain. If the room is warmed to 
a proper living temperature by furnace 
or steam heat alone, it feels stuffy and 
close ; and the student who lives in it 
finds it difficult to keep awake over her 
work, begins to lose her appetite, and 
grows dull and sluggish generally. The 
open fire is an extra item of expense 



J6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

at most of our colleges, but the parent 
who incurs it will be fully repaid in 
the increased health and increased 
power of work that will be shown by 
her daughter on account of it. 

The ventilation, heating, and light- 
ing of lecture-rooms and class-rooms 
is seldom what it should be. Perhaps 
if parents would complain more about 
these things, something might be done 
to remedy them ; but this is in gen- 
eral a rather hard matter, even with 
the best intentions, to provide for. It 
is, then, of the utmost importance that 
the parent should attend very particu- 
larly to these conditions where they 
can be the most easily regulated, in 
the residence-halls ; for if matters are 
well managed there, the student can 
endure the discomforts of the class- 



FOR WOMEN. 77 

room for the few hours each day that 
she must spend in them. 

The requisite for health in college 
women most talked about and insisted 
upon in general discussion is physical 
exercise and training. Not many years 
ago systematic athletics under regular 
supervision was unknown in colleges for 
women ; no definite courses in physical 
education were given, little gymnastic 
drill of any kind was practised, and 
there was little voluntary occupation in 
out-door sports. To-day nearly every 
college has its well-equipped gymna- 
sium, makes attendance and exercise 
there obligatory, gives courses in physi- 
cal training, and organizes athletic 
sports under competent direction, so 
that there appears to be little danger 
that the student will fail to realize the 



78 COLLEGE TRAINING 

importance of this element in college- 
life. 

It is now time to say something em- 
phatic about food, which is at least as 
important as exercise 1 and much less 
considered. The impression has gained 
wide currency that our colleges have for- 
gotten the wicked ways of the old-fash- 
ioned boarding-schools, where genteel 
starvation was the order of the day. 
That impression is not fully correct. 
There is hardly a college in this country 
that sets a table adequate to supply the 
needs of the young and growing bod- 

1 Some indication of the relative value of food 
and exercise in promoting good health may be found 
in the fact that girls going to college from country 
communities (which are as a rule not so well-nour- 
ished, but are more accustomed to exercise) do not 
show as high an average of health as girls going to 
college from city communities (which are in general 
better nourished, but less accustomed to exercise). 



FOR WOMEN. 79 

ies and the actively working minds of 
its students. 

The importance of specially nourish- 
ing food for the brainworker has never 
been thoroughly recognized. It is 
thought that the farmer, the laborer, 
and the mechanic must have their beef 
and mutton, but that the student needs 
only a spare, light diet, since he appar- 
ently does nothing to call for more. 
Physiological investigation shows, how- 
ever, that while the manual laborer can 
get on very well with a diet of grains 
and vegetables, for which a strong di- 
gestion is required to separate the ne- 
cessary amount of nutrition from the 
great bulk of waste associated with it 
in such foods, the brainworker does 
his best work upon meat, a sort of 
food that contains much nourishment 



80 COLLEGE TRAINING 

in small bulk, and that is especially- 
easy of assimilation. 

The woman-student is at a double 
disadvantage where eating is concerned. 
Not only is she, as a student, supposed 
to require less food than the manual 
worker, but as a woman she is expected 
to care less and know less about eating 
than a man. Women as a class are 
notoriously regardless of eating; partly 
because, as the cooks of the race, they 
think first of feeding others and only 
secondarily of themselves ; partly be- 
cause, having been hitherto consumers 
rather than producers, they do not feel 
at liberty to spend much time or money 
upon their own comfort ; and partly be- 
cause the ascetic ideal, coming in with 
the church doctrine of subdual of the 
flesh, has found more acceptance with 



FOR WOMEN. 8 1 

that half of the race by nature inclined 
more to the spiritual than to the mate- 
rial. 

It is then considered not quite w wo- 
manly " to make much of a disturbance 
about eating. Yet the woman student, 
with the heavy demands on her system, 
with her delicate organization, with an 
appetite too refined and discriminating 
to find satisfaction in crude and coarse 
cooking, needs the most carefully pre- 
pared and the most nourishing food it 
is possible to get, to enable her to do 
her work successfully and creditably. 
What is the use of an elaborate system 
of physical training without some store 
of food-supply as a basis ? What is the 
use of out-door exercise to purify the 
blood, if there is no proper nourishment 
to feed it ? 



82 COLLEGE TRAINING 

An important place among the causes 
of ill-health in college women is assigned 
to worry ; but it is interesting to re- 
member that one of the earliest symp- 
toms of under-feeding is lowness of 
spirits and a general depression of feel- 
ing. The sufferer from under-feeding 
does not localize his discomfort in any 
one organ of the body ; but, feeling it as 
an undertone of gloom and distress in 
all his mental operations, he promptly 
attributes it to mental causes, and thinks 
he is discouraged, disappointed, unap- 
preciated, homesick, or even in love, 
when he is really only under-fed. The 
dyspeptic is proverbially a pessimist, and 
we may perhaps venture the guess that 
the strenuous Puritan conscience was in- 
flamed to its uncomfortable pitch of irri- 
tation by a lack on these bleak shores of 



FOR WOMEN. 83 

the generous diet of old England. It 
may be doubted if women would be so 
nervous, so "sensitive," so prone to 
tears, as tradition credits them with be- 
ing, if they habitually had enough to eat. 
The parent, then, in choosing a col- 
lege for the daughter, must look care- 
fully to the sort of table that is to be set 
before her. This is a matter that needs 
close attention, because it is so very 
hard to remedy. The college has pro- 
vided means of exercise for pupils, partly 
because parents and the public could 
see whether this was done or not, partly 
because gymnasiums, athletic fields and 
athletic teams, are means of attraction, 
and a good advertisement. The college 
does not provide as good a table as it 
ought to, because no one outside can 
easily know, or will care especially 



84 COLLEGE TRAINING 

whether it does so or not. The college 
begrudges to food an expenditure it 
might use for the enlargement of its 
faculty, or it prefers to keep living 
expenses to the lowest point so that as 
few students as possible may be kept 
away by the cost. Often the college 
may spend money enough for the raw 
material of food, but will employ some 
incompetent person as housekeeper, who 
has no judgment in the selection or 
preparation of food. Students them- 
selves are unwilling to complain pub- 
licly of a poor table for fear of being 
" disloyal " to their college; and the col- 
lege, knowing this, is disposed to pay 
little attention to their remonstrances in 
private. Sometimes the students them- 
selves regulate the table in student clubs, 
and reduce diet far below what it ought 



FOR WOMEN. 85 

to be, in their desire to reduce expenses 
as far as possible. 

If the parent tries to find out whether 
college fare is or is not adequate for the 
needs of the college student, the task 
is a hard one. College managers can 
scarcely be made to feel how important 
this matter is ; and in order to ward off 
criticism, and yet keep on in their old 
way, they will resort to various devices 
to give the parent a good impression 
of the table. When it is known that 
visitors are coming, extra preparations 
may be made, or extra attention and ex- 
tra fare may be given at teachers' and 
guests' tables. The parent, even when 
hitting upon an average meal or two, 
can hardly realize what it would be to 
live on such meals day after day and 
month after month. As the matter is 



86 COLLEGE TRAINING 

so difficult to get at, the paren»t must try 
all the more to know just how the col- 
lege feeds its students habitually ; every 
means for personal observation must be 
used, and the daughter must be encour- 
aged to report accurately her daily ex- 
perience. 

The trouble can be remedied if the 
colleges set seriously to work to do it. 
Large households, like the college house- 
hold, can be fed year in and year out, to 
their continued satisfaction as well as 
benefit, if money enough is spent to pay 
for materials, and care and thought 
enough are spent in providing, preparing, 
and serving them. It is of the greatest 
importance to every one concerned that 
this matter should be set right, — to the 
college, to parents, and to students, who 
all have the success of the higher edu- 



FOR WOMEN. 8? 

cation at heart. The cases of broken 
health due to imperfect feeding are 
bruited about as " the result of the 
higher education ; " and the whole move- 
ment receives, most unjustly, a serious 
setback in the community. 

All the factors of a healthy life above 
mentioned act together in building up 
the student. Exercise creates a demand 
for wholesome food ; good food relieves 
the student from the feeling of utter ex- 
haustion after work that makes exercise 
so distasteful ; ventilation and sunlight 
in the student's room help to keep her 
in the general condition of normal phys- 
ical activity in which food and exercise 
can do the most good. 

Having seen that the conditions ne- 
cessary to physical well-being are pres- 
ent in the college, the parent must now 



88 COLLEGE TRAINING 

see that those conditions are also pres- 
ent which are necessary to the mental 
and moral development of the student, 
but which cannot be set down in definite 
form in the catalogue. The parent must 
try to learn something, through personal 
acquaintance, of the student body, the 
instructing body, and the administrative 
body of the college. 

It is hard to explain fully how any 
considerable knowledge of persons and 
their influence is gained by a merely 
casual meeting with them, such as is 
likely to be the limit of acquaintance 
to most parents with the various groups 
in the college before the girl is placed 
there ; and those who are judged as a 
result of it will be very likely to protest 
that such a judgment is unfair. The 
instructor, for example, will feel that 



FOR WOMEN. 89 

the parent, unlearned in any specialty, 
cannot judge him or his work on a 
chance visit to a class-room ; and yet 
something very real is gained even 
under these circumstances to fill out the 
bare outline furnished by the college 
catalogue in regard to its teaching- 
staff. 

The influence of personality, so hard 
to define, is easy to feel, even upon com- 
paratively short acquaintance. The rec- 
ord of degrees, of published work, of 
academic honors or standing, leaves 
something to be added in regard to the 
real character and motives of the man 
or woman. Who could guess before- 
hand that a certain professor, known 
widely for his brilliant and inspiring 
written work in his chosen subject, 
could be so dull and depressing in his 



90 COLLEGE TRAINING 

college-teaching? Who could fancy 
that this other, distinguished for his 
leadership in certain great moral move- 
ments, is so honeycombed with vanity 
and self-conceit that instruction and dis- 
cussion in his class-room are replaced 
by oracular deliverances from the chair, 
and mute adoration (or equally mute 
hostility) from the benches ? Who could 
know that this other, showing by his 
record some devotion to pure scholar- 
ship and presumably to its ideals, would 
make his classes a scene of social diver- 
sion to himself, by playing upon the 
personal prejudices, rivalries, vanities, 
and foolish sentimentalities of his pu- 
pils ? Still another may be learned in 
book-lore, but so lacking in general cul- 
tivation, and so ill-mannered, as to be 
quite unsuited to the office of develop- 



FOR WOMEN. 91 

ing refinement of thought and feeling in 
others. All the traits above indicated 
show themselves quickly, even to the 
casual observer, and should be consid- 
ered as fitting for condemnation and 
reproof in a college professor as in any 
other man or woman. The scholar, of 
all others, has the least excuse for these, 
and can, indeed, do the most harm by 
them. In the old phrase, " getttleman 
and scholar " should describe the per- 
sons under whose care our young people 
are to come. 

Not less important is some personal 
acquaintance with the administrative 
body that has so much to do in form- 
ing the college- spirit, and in regulating 
the conditions of college-life. It is 
most important to know whether that 
body holds the proper ideals before the 



92 COLLEGE TRAINING 

student, and encourages the proper 
motives. Does it, or does it not, fos- 
ter anxious contest over " marks " and 
"honors " ? Does it, or does it not, recog- 
nize the pushing and the showy student 
at the expense of the quiet, scholarly 
one ? Does it, or does it not, in its deal- 
ings show a strict regard for integrity ? 
or is it found to be using the students, 
and perhaps the instructors too, as 
pawns on a chess-board, to be moved 
here and there at convenience as best 
suits the exigencies of a game of its 
own ? The parent should be convinced 
that the true welfare of the student is 
really and genuinely the main object of 
the college, as represented by its gov- 
erning body, and not increase in num- 
bers, endowments, or the proud position 
of "first" in some shape or other. 



FOR WOMEN. 93 

The parent should also take some 
pains to come into personal contact 
with that group-person, the student 
body. A great deal of discussion on 
the subject of co-education is wasted 
because the matter is argued from an 
abstract point of view, without regard 
to the concrete conditions involved. 
A little observation is worth a hundred 
theories. If the mother is undecided 
whether she wants her daughter edu- 
cated with men and women together, 
or with women alone, let her go where 
the conditions she has in mind are act- 
ually existing, and see whether in act- 
ual fact the result, as shown in the 
general character and physiognomy of 
the student-group, is such as she would 
approve of. 

It may be said that the parent can 



94 COLLEGE TRAINING 

find out especially little of the real na- 
ture of the student-group in a brief visit, 
hampered as it is by the conventionali- 
ties that shut out the chance visitor of 
mature years from the inner circle of 
student-life. 

But the careful observer can get a 
great deal, even under these hindrances. 
Trifles reveal much. Looks, manner, 
bearing, little ways of doing and saying 
things, are evidences of general char- 
acter and tone. The parent can tell 
whether the student-personality is well 
or ill-bred ; whether the typical student 
is clear-voiced but quiet, or shrill-toned, 
noisy, and voluble ; whether she steps 
with the alert springiness of health and 
a hearty interest in things, or with the 
heavy tramp of rude boorishness or 
the dragging shuffle of sentimentality 



FOR WOMEN. 95 

and languor. Her manner of dealing 
with her fellows in the public and ob- 
vious places where the casual stranger 
is likely to encounter her tells some- 
thing about her. Is she gushing, chat- 
tering, regardless of the presence of 
strangers, and unrestrained in demon- 
stration of any chance feeling, or is 
she seen to be pleasantly companion- 
able, yet with a delicate reserve that 
keeps intact the conventions of a re- 
fined society and a gentle home ; 
Does she, or does she not, manifest a 
certain unpleasant priggishness ? Does 
she, or does she not, indulge in the false 
patriotism that consists in obtrusive 
laudation of everything within her own 
college, and criticism and condemna- 
tion of everything outside of it? The 
mother can tell pretty well after brief 



g6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

observation of the college-group whether 
the traits of that group are those she 
would be glad to see encouraged and 
developed in her daughter. 

All this may seem a rather laborious 
method of getting a daughter started in 
a chosen line of work ; but parenthood, 
properly followed, is of necessity a labo- 
rious occupation. No mechanical de- 
vice has been as yet invented by which 
a child may be trained in the way it 
should go without labor on the part of 
its parents ; and every child brought 
into the world has a right to this train- 
ing, and thus to the parents' thought 
and care. The results, too, are worth 
all the trouble and cost. The girl her- 
self gets benefit by such training ; fur- 
thermore, the general system of educa- 
tion would receive a lift in that way that 



FOR WOMEN. 97 

it could get in no other, and, in conse- 
quence, the general plane of society at 
large would be correspondingly elevated. 
In education, as in touring, " personally 
conducted " is an excellent motto. 



98 COLLEGE TRAINING 

CHAPTER IV. 

LIFE AT COLLEGE. 

/ T^HAT the years passed within col- 
-*■ lege walls make up a period 
looked back upon as one of the most, 
if not the most, delightful in life, is the 
almost universal testimony of those who 
have had experience of them. Even 
supposing the years have not been 
"well-spent," in the sense in which that 
phrase would be used by judicious and 
sober-minded elderly relatives and ad- 
visers, the student has found in them 
much pleasure, and has got at least a 
little good. And yet every student feels 
at the end of the four years as if she 
could have improved upon her use of 



FOR WOMEN. 99 

them, and would like a chance to try 
them over again. Some of the things 
she thinks to herself at the end of her 
college-life would be of use to her fel- 
low-student just beginning, if it were 
not for the unfortunate peculiarity of 
lessons learned from experience, — that 
they cannot be passed on at second 
hand to others; the skilful old school- 
mistress herself must teach every one 
directly. Still, there is a chance that 
a word here and there will be listened 
to and remembered, which may help, 
or in a small degree forestall, the pro- 
cess of experience. 

One of the things the outgoing stu- 
dent thinks is that she could have 
selected her studies better. With the 
present prevalence of the elective sys- 
tem in our colleges, the student has 



100 COLLEGE TRAINING 

thrown upon her the responsibility of 
forming for herself, to a great extent, the 
general outlines of her college-course. 
There is a natural tendency on the part 
of the entering student to choose work 
for the subject, and not with reference 
to the facilities offered for pursuing it. 
There is also a tendency to choose that 
subject for special study in the college 
that has taken up the bulk of time, 
thought, and interest in the preparatory 
school. The beginner at college will, 
in nine cases out of ten, fancy herself 
a warm devotee of the classics, because 
she has left the preparatory school 
flushed with the delight of partial mas- 
tery of a subject associated most closely 
with the idea of the college for gener- 
ations and generations. The student 
will usually find, however, as her mind 



FOR WOMEN. 10 1 

matures, and as she has more experi- 
ence, that a continued lingering in clas- 
sic shades does not satisfy her, and that 
when she has once gained the power of 
easy access to the treasures of classic 
thought by the acquirement of a good 
reading knowledge of Greek and Latin, 
she is ready to turn to something else. 
She must not, then, be too quick in de- 
ciding just what her specialty is to be, 
for she cannot be sure of her true bent 
with the small experience she has upon 
entering college. 

Whatever her special tastes may really 
prove to be, the student of to-day should 
try in her college-course to gain some 
acquaintance with the subjects that 
connect themselves with the active in- 
terests and growing tendencies of the 
time. Suppose that she does not share 



102 COLLEGE TRAINING 

these interests or approve of these ten- 
dencies; even to combat them prop- 
erly she must know something accurate 
and definite about them. No student 
should leave college without some ac- 
quaintance with physical science and its 
methods, or without some familiarity 
with one or more of the social studies 
now undergoing so rapid a development, 
and occupying such an increasingly 
prominent place in the thought of the 
time. 

The student should not only get out 
of the beaten track of what she thinks 
is her specialty enough to select other 
subjects, but she should also go beyond 
consideration of the subject at all, if 
she happens to know of a particularly 
brilliant and inspiring instructor whose 
work she may choose. Let her place 



FOR WOMEN. 103 

herself (if ner preparation and the scope 
of choice allowed by the college permit 
it) under the good teacher, no matter 
what he teaches ; for it is, after all, not 
what one learns in the college, but how 
one learns, that is of the most impor- 
tance. The general mental stimulus 
gained from brilliant thought and clear 
exposition in one subject will be of 
benefit when one turns to others ; and 
besides, the great man or woman, os- 
tensibly teaching one subject only, will 
often, in chance allusions and observa- 
tions, throw more light on other, appar- 
ently foreign subjects, than is gained 
from direct instruction in a full course 
where the teaching is dull and narrow. 

Another thing the outgoing student 
thinks is, that she could have secured 
better results with less fuss and fatigue. 



104 COLLEGE TRAINING 

The girl upon entering college is bewil- 
dered by the variety and complexity of 
the new arrangements and the new 
tasks; she is distracted by association 
with the new and unexplored personali- 
ties about her. In many of our colleges 
work is set at a fairly hard pace ; and 
unless the student is quick to arrange 
and plan it out, she will find herself 
overwhelmed before she knows it by 
the ever-mounting sum of each day's re- 
quirements. The conscientious student, 
at first experience of the new tasks, is 
apt to spend her entire waking time, 
and some that should be devoted to 
sleep, in the effort to get through them 
in their minutest detail, to the neglect 
of proper exercise and social life ; while 
the more easy-going, discouraged at the 
start, attempts nothing further than so 



FOR WOMEN. I05 

much of study and preparation as shall 
keep her just this side the brink of dis- 
missal from her classes. 

Both extremes are bad, and can easily 
be avoided. The student who has been 
taught at home or in the preparatory 
school to think and not merely to cram, 
should be able from the start to get the 
better of her work. She will know how 
to take up a subject ; separating the im- 
portant features from the unimportant, 
she will grapple strenuously with the 
former, and allow the latter to fall in line 
naturally as the result of firm and defi- 
nite dealing with the main matters. This 
is one important method of saving labor, 
and of disciplining the mind as well ; 
for the mechanical student, who plods 
through everything, thick and thin, with 
the same amount of mental emphasis, 



106 COLLEGE TRAINING 

is not only wearing herself out by her 
toil, but is failing to train that great- 
est of faculties, which is, indeed, in its 
perfection, the secret of genius, — the 
selective power of mind, which gives 
order, proportion, and perspective to any 
matter it takes up. 

Another means of accomplishing the 
best results in the least given time is to 
practise a strict concentration when en- 
gaged in work. Every student should 
have some place where she may be by 
herself to study ; if this is not possible, 
she may and must create a solitude 
about herself that shall be unbroken 
until the study-time is over. It is sur- 
prising to find how much can be done 
in a crowd, and in a noisy crowd too, if 
the student determines resolutely not to 
hear or to see what is going on around 



FOR WOMEN. I07 

her. Very unfortunate is that person, 
and liable to be very obnoxious to her 
fellow-students, who requires for the pur- 
suance of her study the silence of the 
sick-room and the solitude of the desert. 
On the other hand, the student who 
wants to use her time to the best advan- 
tage will not encourage promiscuous vis- 
iting or indulge in casual conversation 
while she is at work, nor will she suc- 
cumb to the charms of ensemble study- 
ing, — a most delightful means of pass- 
ing the time, but not found productive 
of the best results. The hard knots, it 
seems, have to be untangled, after all, by 
one's own fingers ; and then, no two stu- 
dents seem to find the same hard knots. 
A distinct help in getting through 
work is found in restricting it to certain 
and proper hours. While within those 



108 COLLEGE TRAINING 

hours the student will practise that 
close concentration just recommended, 
at the end of them she will drop work 
as absolutely and completely as if she 
had never heard of it. The benefit of 
this course is seen when the time comes 
for the student to go at her next task. 
Having had a thorough rest, she is 
able to take up her work with a swing 
and a spirit impossible where she is al- 
ways dragging along at something, and 
she will consequently accomplish much 
more. 

The student who works in this way 
will learn thoroughly well what she does 
learn, even if she does not cover all the 
ground. She will also be assisting the 
college to determine what is the proper 
amount of work to be set the average 
student ; for she win help to show, by the 



FOR WOMEN. IO9 

amount she covers, where the point lies 
beyond which the student must either 
work longer than is healthful and safe, or 
else be superficial. 

This test, to be effective, demands 
that the time set for study should be 
employed with honest concentration and 
application. It also demands that the 
study-time should be some definite pe- 
riod, which is suited to the individual 
student's capacity of endurance, mental 
and physical, and which is not to be 
extended on every occasion of pressure 
from college requirements. The col- 
lege has to make up its estimate of the 
amount of work to be covered in the 
college year or half-year, as an average 
of the work accomplished by the good, 
bad, and indifferent members of its 
classes ; but there is so much false 



IIO COLLEGE TRAINING 

pride in each of these divisions that it 
is found difficult to get at their normal 
power of work. The dull student is 
anxious to be considered at least moder- 
ately capable, and will not admit that 
she must work beyond the limits of 
healthful activity in order to cover the 
ground that the others do. The ordi- 
nary student wants to be ranked with 
the clever student, and she, in turn, 
overworks ; while the clever student, 
for her part, feeling the pressure of 
those behind her, finds that in order to 
keep her reputation for unusual quick- 
ness and ability, she, too, must spend 
more hours than she ought over her 
tasks. 

In the mad race to do everything, 
they all, in their fatigue, lose the best 
good of what they are trying to get. 



FOR WOMEN. Ill 

The dull student should frankly rec- 
cognize that no two persons are of 
exactly equal ability in all directions, 
and that each one must make the best 
of herself without regard to what others 
are making of themselves ; and she 
must resolutely determine to spend an 
extra year in the college if it seems 
necessary to do so in order to get the 
full benefit of the college-course. At 
the other extreme, the bright student 
must remember that a college reputa- 
tion is fleeting at best, and that for 
real work in the world she stands a 
better chance if she takes things a little 
easy, looks about her a little, and allows 
her mind some liberty to grow in the 
way of nature. 

When the working-hours are over, 
comes the opportunity for various out- 



112 COLLEGE TRAINING 

side activities that are useful to the 
student in many ways. The debating 
society, the college paper, the glee club, 
the dramatic organization, call for va- 
ried talents and a ready activity on the 
part of the student, and tend to cul- 
tivate them in her. She must assume a 
degree of responsibility in the conduct 
of these enterprises that will bring out 
latent capabilities for decisive action ; 
her powers of invention are stimulated 
as they perhaps never are in the class- 
room ; and in working with others for 
a common end, she learns something of 
the valuable art of leadership, or the no 
less valuable art of helpful subordination. 
After work-hours, too, comes exer- 
cise, which should be conscientiously 
attended to in the form that best fits 
the individual case. Of late years, in 



FOR WOMEN. 113 

our laudable desire to cultivate the 
body along with the mind, liberal sac- 
rifice has been paid to the gymnasium 
fetich. Exercise in the gymnasium has 
been made compulsory in most of our 
colleges, in the belief that it will be of 
benefit to every student engaging in it 
under proper direction. In many in- 
stances, however, gymnasium work of 
any kind is felt as an additional task, 
heaped upon the task of study, not the 
refreshment and restorative afterstudy 
that it is meant to be. To do good, 
exercise must be attended by two cir- 
cumstances, one mental and one physi- 
cal ; namely, enjoyment and fresh air. 
To many students no enjoyment what- 
ever is afforded by gymnasium work — 
it seems a stupid, aimless performance 
in all its diversities ; and as for air, that 



114 COLLEGE TRAINING 

which floats casually through opened 
upper windows is but a poor substitute 
for the wide and sunlit expanse of the 
great ocean of atmosphere that bathes 
all out-of-doors in its invigorating cur- 
rents. 

Gymnasium work is considered ne- 
cessary from the mistaken but wide- 
spread notion that muscular develop- 
ment is in itself a good thing. The 
process of developing the muscle is 
attended by heightened respiration, and 
a consequent enrichment of the blood, 
whereby is offered increased nourish- 
ment to the organs and tissues in gen- 
eral, including that greedy bloodsucker, 
the brain. But the muscles themselves 
are greedy also ; and if the process of 
their development is carried on so vigor- 
ously that they absorb for their own 



FOR WOMEN. 115 

needs the greater part of the nourish- 
ment afforded by the freshened blood, 
the worker is left with a sense of fatigue 
in the mind instead of the renewed 
strength and power she ought to feel. 
Many students have this sense of fa- 
tigue after work in the gymnasium, but 
feel a decided refreshment after out-of- 
door exercise, which quickens and puri- 
fies the blood at least as well as, if not 
better than, gymnasium practice. That 
student is wise, then, who, after suitable 
trial, finding this to be the case with 
her, frankly and deliberately gets rid of 
the gymnasium all she can, and walks, 
rides, drives, wheels, and plays tennis 
or basket-ball, changing the current of 
her thought as well as of her blood, so 
that she will return to her books with 
fresh delight and zest. 



Il6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

The student should eat well and regu- 
larly. There is probably no use in say- 
ing anything to the young collegian 
about the harmful effects of too much 
tea, biscuits, potted meats, and candy at 
unholy hours. Perhaps the best thing 
to do is to advise hearty and consistent 
application to the most nourishing food 
to be found on the college tables. If 
the three stated meal-times do not af- 
ford enough, if there is a certain period 
every day in which the system calls for 
replenishment, the student should not 
be weary of complaining until condi- 
tions are set right; and if complaint is 
finally useless, she must make regular 
provision for this need out of stores 
of her own, selected for wholesomeness 
and real nourishment. 

Social life is as important to the stu- 



FOR WOMEN. 117 

dent as exercise or food; and is taken 
to so naturally by the average girl that 
it is scarcely necessary to recommend 
it, but rather to suggest the possibility 
of undue indulgence in its delights. 
There is an overpowering fascination 
for the incoming student in the new 
personalities by which she is surrounded, 
and one of her most interesting occupa- 
tions is to come into relation with them. 
Before she knows it almost, she is a 
member of a " set," or small group, with 
whom her lot is thenceforth cast, and 
with whom she is associated in the gen- 
eral estimation from that time on. 

As these associations are so influen- 
tial in determining a student's place in 
the college-world, and have a decided 
effect upon her own character as well, 
the cardinal maxim for this case should 



Il8 COLLEGE TRAINING 

be, " Don't be in a hurry." The stu- 
dent should restrain for a bit her first 
impulsive motions to hand-and-glove 
fellowship, until the glamour of novelty 
wears off, and she knows her ground. 
It is not always those most in evidence 
to the new-comer — those that welcome 
her the most boisterously, or that are 
the most conspicuous at casual meeting 
here and there — that will prove to be 
the most valuable friends or the most 
healthful influences. 

In her association with the student- 
group as a whole, the student who 
pays no attention to " college-opinion," 
the expression of the collective mind, 
is something like Aristotle's non-social 
man, either above or below human- 
ity. She must, however, in following it, 
use common-sense and good judgment. 



FOR WOMEN. II9 

College-opinion does much that is good 
to form character and manners, but it 
also takes some freaky and foolish 
turns ; and while it would be expecting 
the wisdom of years in the head of 
youth to think that a student will know 
just when to conform and when to stand 
out against the dictum of the collective 
mind, she must try to make a distinc- 
tion as best she can by the aid of her 
own reason. 

She will respect the sentiment now 
prevalent in the college-group of dis- 
taste for the " grind " far enough not to 
make studies and books the sole theme 
of conversation, and yet she will see to 
it that solid work and thought are re- 
spected in her person and in others; 
she will try not to be so ill-dressed and 
untidy as to call down criticism from 



120 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the college-group on that score, yet she 
will not enter into any competition for 
superiority in garb and ornament. She 
will not try to make herself that college 
divinity, the " popular girl," nor will she 
envy her that proud position; but she 
will make herself sure of the quiet but 
genuine respect and regard of her fellow- 
students, by attending faithfully to her 
own business, and at the same time 
showing an obliging disposition and an 
unassuming manner. She will, in short, 
remember that the judgment of the col- 
lege-circle is not final, though it will 
probably embody a certain rough truth 
in regard to her and her actions that 
she may profit by. 

Besides her intercourse with the stu- 
dent-body, the student comes into more 
or less close relation with the teaching 



FOR WOMEN. 121 

and administrative body. One of the 
things the student thinks when she 
leaves the college, or more likely when 
she has been out a year or two, and has 
looked about her a little in the world, is 
that she would show a little different 
spirit in her relations with her instruc- 
tors if she had her college-life to live 
over again. She would show more lib- 
erality on the one hand, more indepen- 
dence on the other. 

Women seem by nature to demand 
from others and themselves a logical 
and abstract consistency that the vary- 
ing phases of actual concrete life do not 
permit. It is one of the long-standing 
misconceptions concerning the sex that 
women are the illogical branch of the 
human race : on the contrary, they are 
the most bent on strict deduction from 



122 COLLEGE TRAINING 

premise to conclusion in every instance. 
The wider contact with the world that 
men have had through so many ages 
has tended to make them see a little 
more clearly that abstract formulation 
is at best a most inadequate covering 
for the infinitely variable, infinitely com- 
plex, truth of things, and that verbal 
expression is a most elusive and am- 
biguous representation of thought. 

A certain lack of the spirit of allow- 
ance seems a special feature of the 
woman's college. The instructors there 
find that they must be extremely careful 
at all times how they commit themselves 
in expression, since they are sure to be 
pinned down to every syllable and letter 
of it thereafter. The woman-student 
should try to realize and accept the fact 
that truth transcends expression, that 



FOR WOMEN. 123 

views of truth may be somewhat irreg- 
ular or even verbally erroneous, and yet 
at the same time profoundly stimulating. 
Let her, then, accept in the broadest 
spirit the instruction offered, and not 
waste the actual good of it in niggling 
criticism of minor inconsistencies and 
peculiarities. 

The feeling that truth has so many 
aspects, and is so hard to catch and 
define, will also make the student more 
independent in her attitude toward her 
instructors, as well as more tolerant of 
them. The real world is so rich and 
various, the individual mind is so imper- 
fect and limited, that each one can re- 
flect only a few phases of the great 
complex. . No one mind can adequately 
formulate the universe: the "answer" 
in the book and the doctrine of the 



124 COLLEGE TRAINING 

professor do not exhaust knowledge. 
All that has been found out is but a 
speck in the ocean of the unknown. 
The professor is a learner as well as 
the student, who, as a separate and dis- 
tinct facet in the many-sided crystal of 
human society, may reflect a gleam of 
truth un caught by any of the others. 
Hence the student need not hang help- 
lessly upon the opinions, views, ideas, 
and estimates of her favorite professor, 
but should try to cultivate some of her 
own. 

The student must try also not to find 
her only support in the professor's ap- 
proval ; nor should she be so anxious 
to win his good opinion as to become 
the victim of a fevered self-conscious- 
ness in every act of her daily inter- 
course with him. It is natural for the 



FOR WOMEN. 125 

girl-student to lay much emphasis on 
approval ; since all the ages have united 
in declaring that woman's great func- 
tion is to please, and to please by that 
which is most closely associated with 
her personality, — by her beauty of form 
and feature, by her manner, and by her 
dress. It would not be strange, then, 
if, as a result of the force of social 
tradition, women should think when 
doing anything, not simply of what they 
are doing and of the effect their work 
will have, but of how they appear while 
doing it, and what impression they are 
making. This would be particularly the 
case in a pursuit that is new to them, 
as the higher education is. Habit makes 
long-followed employments more or less 
automatic, so that self-consciousness 
would naturally be less aroused in them. 



126 COLLEGE TRAINING 

With this double influence at work, 
the wonder is not that the college-girl 
shows so much self-consciousness, but 
so little. It is not she, usually, but 
some one else, who blazons the fact 
that she is a student, and " knows so 
much one does not dare to speak to 
her." 

The self-consciousness shown by the 
woman - student is usually evidenced 
more in relation with her instructors 
than anywhere else, for a special rea- 
son that lifts it above the plane of 
mere vanity. The college-girl feels that 
the higher education for women is still 
regarded as more or less of an experi- 
ment. In that experiment she is the 
object worked with, tested, and closely 
scrutinized : the professors are the more 
or less friendly, always critical and ob- 



FOR WOMEN. 127 

servant, experimenters. She feels that 
in her success or failure in so far de- 
pends the success or failure of the 
higher education for woman in general ; 
and from this feeling in large part 
arises that extreme sensibility to praise 
and blame so often noticed in our 
woman's colleges, and that feverish 
anxiety to do with mechanical precis- 
ion and completeness all possible tasks 
set by instructors. It would be inju- 
dicious to tell a boy to pay little atten- 
tion to what his professors think of 
him ; it would be merely a wholesome 
corrective of an exaggerated tendency 
to tell a girl the same thing. 

That girl keeps the proper attitude 
of mind toward her instructors who, 
taking them for what they are, men and 
women of more knowledge and experi- 



128 COLLEGE TRAINING 

ence than herself, but with inevitable 
imperfection, uses their comment and 
criticism for her own improvement and 
instruction, but makes her own judg- 
ment and good sense, not theirs, the 
ultimate standard of appeal for her 
guidance. 

That student will not burst into tears 
at criticism, feeling herself personally 
degraded by failure to come up to the 
instructor's standard ; she will simply 
think she is getting the guidance and 
advice she came to college for. She 
will not writhe and shrivel under sar- 
casm ; she will simply think the instruc- 
tor has bad manners. She will not suffer 
for lack of the praise she sees heaped 
upon others whom she considers her 
inferiors ; she will simply think that 
tastes differ, and that if she is doing 



FOR WOMEN. 129 

her best work and the professor does 
not happen to fancy it, it is a matter 
of small consequence. 

A little wholesome and sturdy self- 
reliance without self-assertion is a de- 
sirable quality. It is this self-reliance, 
and the power to think and to act 
developed in the four years of college- 
life, as well as the information gained 
in them, that enables the college-stu- 
dent to come out into the world to be 
a useful and helpful member of society 
instead of a drag and burden on it. 



I30 COLLEGE TRAINING 



CHAPTER V. 

THE GRADUATE STUDENT. 

GRADUATE study as a process of 
acquirement that follows practi- 
cally the same methods and pursues 
the same ends as the undergraduate 
course is by no means new to us in 
this country. There is, however, an- 
other kind of graduate study that pro- 
ceeds on quite different lines from the 
work of the undergraduate school. In 
it the student tries not only to acquire, 
but to produce, not merely to make 
himself master of the existing stock of 
knowledge, but to add something to it. 

In this latter sense, graduate study 
has not long been followed here ; but in 



FOR WOMEN. 131 

this brief period it has experienced such 
rapid and strong development, that it 
has fairly crowded out the other kind 
from the right to its name, and to-day 
we mean by "graduate study" dis- 
tinctly the work of original research, 
and by the graduate student, the in- 
vestigator and would-be discoverer. 

The year 1876, which marks more 
than one epoch in our national life, 
marks the beginning of a distinct move- 
ment in this country toward graduate 
study of the latter type, with the open- 
ing of the Johns Hopkins University, 
which established as its ideal the en- 
couragement of original research here 
as it was carried on in the German 
universities. 

The movement thus started was felt 
in all parts of the collegiate system. 



132 COLLEGE TRAINING 

Twenty-four colleges and universities 
are now represented in a Federation 
of Graduate Clubs, on the ground of 
offering extended and thorough grad- 
uate courses ; and of this number only 
five were engaged in giving such work, 
and had granted higher degrees in rec- 
ognition of it, before the Johns Hop- 
kins University was opened. In 1885 
Bryn Mawr College for women was 
founded, after the model of Johns Hop- 
kins, providing for graduate instruc- 
tion from the first. In the same year 
a graduate department was organized in 
the University of Pennsylvania. In 
1889 Barnard College for women was 
opened, giving access to graduate fa- 
cilities at Columbia College ; Brown 
granted its first degrees from a grad- 
uate department ; and Clark University 



FOR WOMEN. 133 

at Worcester, founded for purposes of 
graduate study exclusively, began its 
work. In 1890 the graduate depart- 
ment of Columbia College was thor- 
oughly reorganized, and the Leland 
Stanford Jr. University was opened, 
offering graduate courses from the be- 
ginning. In 1892, another epoch-mak- 
ing year in the history of our national 
civilization, the University of Chicago 
opened its doors, offering ample op- 
portunities for research work in every 
department; Yale University reorgan- 
ized its graduate school, and opened 
it to women ; and several other insti- 
tutions either reorganized graduate de- 
partments or established them for the 
first time. 

The work goes on with no abatement 
of vigor, and in all this progress 



134 COLLEGE TRAINING 

women have shared the benefits. In 
nineteen of the twenty-four colleges on 
the list of the Federation of Graduate 
Clubs, which embraces practically all of 
the institutions doing really important 
graduate work in this country, women 
have the enjoyment of graduate privi- 
leges, either exclusively or equally with 
men ; of the five remaining, which nom- 
inally do not receive women, two, 
Harvard and Columbia, extend their 
graduate opportunities to women under 
cover of registration at Barnard and 
Radcliffe; and two more, Johns Hop- 
kins and Clark, have been known to 
accord to women who especially wished 
and needed it, access to their lecture- 
rooms and laboratories, and other privi- 
leges. 

The graduate field in this country is, 



FOR WOMEN. I35 

then, practically open in its entire ex- 
tent to the woman-student. Looking 
across the sea, we find there also wide 
opportunity for her. A new era for 
woman's education abroad was begun 
with the opening to women of the Uni- 
versity of Zurich in 1872. 

In some countries of Europe, not, 
strangely enough, in those inhabited 
by descendants of that primitive Teu- 
tonic race to which we are wont to 
ascribe the dogma of woman's equality 
with man, but in the Romance coun- 
tries of France, Italy, and Spain, the 
privileges of the universities have never 
been formally denied to women, al- 
though custom and general social feel- 
ing have until a recent date largely 
kept those privileges in practice re- 
served for men. 



I36 COLLEGE TRAINING 

But after the opening to women of 
the University at Zurich, a general 
movement was begun to make use of 
such opportunities as were at the mo- 
ment available, or could be made so. 
University after university has admitted 
women, either formally and regularly, 
or informally and as a matter of spe- 
cial privilege, until by this time, if the 
woman-student is bent on securing the 
best guidance in any given subject, 
she is practically certain of having 
the opportunity to do so. The uni- 
versities of France, Italy, and Spain, 
of Holland and Belgium, of Norway, 
Sweden, and Denmark, of Switzerland 
and Greece, are open to women on 
the same terms as to men, with some 
small and especial exceptions and ex- 
clusions in certain cases. Many of 



FOR WOMEN. 137 

the universities of Great Britain and 
Canada offer full opportunity and privi- 
lege to women ; while those not regu- 
larly opened to them grant, in most 
cases, an enjoyment of their advan- 
tages in a more or less irregular and 
informal way. In Germany, Austria, 
and Hungary women are allowed a 
more or less definite standing as stu- 
dents, and more or less access, by 
special permission, to opportunities not 
regularly granted. Russia is the one 
country in Europe where the universi- 
ties are strictly and absolutely closed 
to women, and even there plans are 
forming to provide medical instruction 
for them. 

Not only is the field thus widely 
opened, but ample provision is made 
to help the student to enter it who 



I38 COLLEGE TRAINING 

has the ability but not the means to 
do so. Each college on the list of 
the Federation of Graduate Clubs of- 
fers, with one or two exceptions, from 
four to forty fellowships and scholar- 
ships, a large proportion of which are 
open to women exclusively, or to wo- 
men on the same terms as to men; 
while other fellowships and scholarships 
for women are offered by societies and 
private persons interested in the en- 
couragement of research. In some of 
the foreign universities also, scholar- 
ships and fellowships are to be com- 
peted for by women equally with men. 
It would seem, then, that any woman 
who wishes to pursue advanced work 
need not be hindered in her desire by 
lack of means or opportunity. That 
they are taking advantage of the oc- 



FOR WOMEN. 139 

casion is amply evident. The register 
of the Federation of Graduate Clubs 
for 1896-97 shows that of 3,024 stu- 
dents engaged in graduate work dur- 
ing 1895-96 in the twenty-four colleges 
of its membership, 650, or 21 per cent 
of the entire number, were women, — a 
good showing when we consider how 
many influences are at work to keep 
women from following such a career, 
and how lately they have gone into it. 
This leaves out of account, of course, 
all those, many in number, who spent 
the year in graduate study abroad. 

From the membership-list of the As- 
sociation of Collegiate Alumnae, a soci- 
ety composed of women-graduates from 
several representative colleges, may 
be learned something not only of the 
present strength of the movement, but 



I4O COLLEGE TRAINING 

of its rate of increase. While in 1884 
the proportion of M. A.'s to the total 
membership, which includes holders of 
the bachelor's, master's, and doctor's 
degree, was 7 per cent, in 1894 the M. 
A.'s made up 11 per cent of the entire 
number ; and while in the former year 
the proportion of Ph. D.'s to the total 
was the very inconsiderable one of ^ 
per cent, it had mounted by 1894 to 2 
per cent, a rate of increase which, com- 
pared with that of the M. A.'s, shows 
not only an absolute gain for grad- 
uate study in general, but a relative 
gain for that kind of graduate study 
which means research, and for which 
the doctor's degree is the appropriate 
reward. 

The growth of graduate study in this 
country has been so rapid that we have 



FOR WOMEN. I4I 

as yet had scarcely time to see what it 
really means to the student and to the 
community, either in its social or its 
intellectual results. 

Looking at this new development first 
on its social side, we notice that the 
graduate group exercises less control 
over its individual member than is exer- 
cised by the undergraduate group over 
its member. The graduate group, since 
it is made up of members who are con- 
stantly coming and going, cannot ac- 
quire a distinct enough character of its 
own to impress the incoming member 
very strongly; and for the same reason 
of perpetual migration the graduate stu- 
dent herself is not with her group long 
enough to become thoroughly imbued 
with its character, even if it had one. 
Then, too, the average graduate stu- 



I42 COLLEGE TRAINING 

dent is older than the average under- 
graduate, and has lost something of 
the plasticity of youth that renders the 
undergraduate amenable to group con- 
trol. Having already formed herself 
after a certain type of character and 
manner in the undergraduate group of 
which she once formed a part, she is 
less ready to take on new impressions. 
Furthermore, by the very nature of her 
pursuit, she is more isolated from the 
group than the undergraduate; she is 
no longer, like the undergraduate, trav- 
ersing the common ground of already 
acquired knowledge, but is trying to 
cut for herself a path through an un- 
trodden wilderness. 

Under present conditions the grad- 
uate group, with its feeble control over 
its members, and its feeble support for 



FOR WOMEN. I43 

them in an organized popular opinion, 
is thrown in daily contact with a larger, 
more powerful, and more highly organ- 
ized undergraduate group, which as- 
sumes to itself the representation of 
the " college-spirit " of the institution in 
which it is established. The graduate 
is often from another institution, and is 
by that very fact a stranger to the un- 
dergraduate just as the freshman is. 
Even when continuing study in her own 
college, the graduate student is more or 
less out of touch with the undergraduate 
body, owing to her loss of classmates, 
new association with strangers, and 
change of interests. 

The graduate student, then, becomes 
the object of scrutiny and criticism to 
the undergraduate, sometimes not of the 
pleasantest kind. The undergraduate 



144 COLLEGE TRAINING 

is not in sympathy with the peculiar 
interests of the graduate, dislikes her 
alien type of character, and even dis- 
counts her intellectual acquirements be- 
cause they were gathered somewhere 
else. 

Thus the anomalous condition of 
things is presented in which the grad- 
uate student, who should be logically 
the highest type of the college-woman, 
is placed at a comparative disadvantage 
in college opinion ; and the higher de- 
gree, which should stand for more than 
the lower degree, is a much less potent 
passport to alumna fellowship. The 
" alumna " of a college is pre-eminently 
its " bachelor " graduate ; its doctors, if 
without its lower degree, are admitted 
to association usually only after pro- 
longed discussion as to whether one 



FOR WOMEN. I45 

who has been only a graduate student 
can in fairness be considered " one of 
us." The graduate student herself, on 
the other hand, feels that she belongs 
especially to the college-group she was 
first associated with ; and "my college " 
is for her always the one at which she 
took her first degree. 

With all her loyalty to her first col- 
lege, this non-recognition by the college 
where she goes for graduate study is 
not a little unpleasant to the graduate 
student as a personal matter ; it should 
also be unpleasant to her for the sake 
of the class she represents, and the ob- 
jects she is working for. Every time 
any single graduate student is lowered 
in popular estimation, whether from her 
own fault or not, the type of the grad- 
uate student in general is lowered, and 



I46 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the ideal of graduate study is belittled 
and degraded. Each graduate worker, 
then, should feel resting upon her a 
serious responsibility to prevent as far 
as she possibly can any cause, or even 
excuse, for such a discrimination against 
her class. The feeling at the bottom 
of this discrimination is, however, so 
firmly based in real conditions, and is, 
in part, so justifiable, that it cannot be 
changed simply by calling it narrow 
and illogical, but by changing the con- 
ditions. 

The graduate student from outside 
has usually come from a comparatively 
small, comparatively isolated, college to 
a larger and more highly organized 
one ; the type she has assimilated her- 
self to in the institution she has left 
often fails in some desirable particu- 



FOR WOMEN. I47 

lars by comparison with the type she 
finds in the institution she has come 
to. She has, in fact, come there to 
better her opportunities for intellectual 
improvement. Why should she not 
also profit by the opportunity for im- 
provement in other lines, rather than 
hold herself aloof, returning an aggres- 
sive assertion of her own individuality 
to the unwelcome assimilating influences 
of the new group? The graduate stu- 
dent may often learn something valuable 
from the undergraduate, and there is no 
reason why she should be ashamed of 
doing so. 

One cause of the unfortunate diver- 
gence between the graduate and the 
undergraduate is to be found in the 
abuse of "collegiate courtesy," prac- 
tised by colleges only too often, where- 



I48 COLLEGE TRAINING 

by the student is admitted to graduate 
work on an A. B. degree that represents 
attainment about on a level with that 
reached in the sophomore class of the 
college she has come to. The line can- 
not perhaps be drawn strictly by the 
college ; but the student at least can 
draw one for herself, by entering those 
undergraduate classes where she really 
belongs, although she might, legally and 
technically, take her place as a gradu- 
ate student. By waiving, for the pres- 
ent, her graduate rights she will not 
only secure the fullest benefit of the 
purely intellectual advantages offered 
her, but also of the no less useful les- 
sons to be learned from intercourse 
with the social group. 

The matter will also in part be rem- 
edied when, as graduate study becomes 



FOR WOMEN. I49 

more and more a matter of course, and 
more and more one of many choices 
taken for fitness and special taste, the 
curiosity hunter, who is always on hand 
at the opening up of anything new, 
ceases to infest our graduate schools 
with the indefinite expectation of some 
real good, and the definite expectation 
of notoriety. The undergraduate, rooted 
for four years in one spot, trained in 
the proprieties and conservatisms of 
life by an ever-watchful "college-opin- 
ion," will naturally look with suspicion 
upon what may be called the " college 
rounder," who wanders from college to 
college, seeking opportunities that are 
new or but irregularly offered ; from 
professor to professor, seeking inter- 
views and special privileges ; who prides 
herself upon the number of unconven- 



I50 COLLEGE TRAINING 

tional things she has done and unwill- 
ing doors she has forced, and comes 
home again with nothing but the re- 
membrance of haunting so many differ- 
ent lecture-rooms, and gazing upon so 
many famous personages. It is sad 
when a student of this type strays be- 
yond the bounds of her own country ; 
for she can do more to cast discredit 
in foreign lands on the woman-student 
as a class than the quiet, unobtrusive 
worker can hope to counteract in a 
long time, with all her faithfulness and 
accomplishment. 

On the purely intellectual side of her 
life also, the graduate student will have 
some problems to solve, and will meet 
with some perhaps unexpected condi- 
tions. The ideal of production so in 
the ascendant in the graduate school 



FOR WOMEN. 151 

to-day possesses student and profes- 
sor alike. The undergraduate, who was 
fond of study in her college-course, 
when study meant acquirement, looks 
forward with eagerness to equal delight 
in the graduate school, where study 
means progress and discovery ; the pro- 
fessor, who has conducted with success 
the work of giving definite information 
in the undergraduate department, takes 
his first opportunity to open up work 
that shall end in original production. 

The results of this wholesale entry 
into the field are bound to be in many 
cases disappointing. Experience seems 
to show that there is a " law of dimin- 
ishing returns " in mental as well as in 
material agriculture. It seems as if the 
more there are at the work of research, 
the less there is accomplished. An ori- 



152 COLLEGE TRAINING 

ginal thinker has opened up a new- 
subject; he has announced a great dis- 
covery or formulated a brilliant gener- 
alization. Crowds of followers arise, 
attracted by the master's power, who 
hope to take up the theme where he 
left it off, and to carry it out in count- 
less applications and suggestions ; but, 
having taken up the work, they find 
themselves, only too often, merely re- 
peating the master's words in other 
phraseology, elaborating the master's 
thought in small and unimportant de- 
tails, or devoting year after year and 
labor upon labor to showing that the 
great discovery is imperfect, or the bril- 
liant generalization false. 

The stubborn fact can never be got 
over, nor reasoned out of the way, that 
not every student is capable of origi- 



FOR WOMEN. 153 

nal production, and not every instruc- 
tor is capable of guiding and directing 
the process. Two dangers are run 
under these circumstances in trying to 
force production in the graduate school : 
one, that where the attempt is made 
to regulate it closely, the course osten- 
sibly for progress will become one 
merely of acquirement through the in- 
ability of the student or the instructor 
to get beyond the operation of collect- 
ing in one dust-heap material labo- 
riously gathered out of many ; the 
other, that if the attempt at close reg- 
ulation is not made, the graduate stu- 
dent will roam about, uncared for by 
a helpless professor who does not know 
what to do with her, to look vainly for 
an inspiration that persistently refuses 
to descend. The contrasting methods 



154 COLLEGE TRAINING 

of close direction and of occasional sug- 
gestion, each with its advantages and 
usefulness under competent leadership 
and with competent followers, are 
equally useless when employed by the 
uninspired instructor with the unorigi- 
nal student. 

In view of all these considerations, 
may it be said that graduate study in 
general is worth while ? and is it a 
kind of effort to be encouraged by the 
community, or not? With due regard 
to its conditions and limitations, it is 
decidedly worth while. The graduate 
student has a great work to do for a 
society that is growing every day more 
and more complex, and must depend 
more and more upon the painstaking 
researches of specialists for its basis 
of action. Although the amount of 



FOR WOMEN. I55 

valuable product from graduate study 
may not increase proportionately to the 
increase in number of those engaged 
in turning it out ; yet little by little 
some gain is made, and as a result of 
successive buildings and demolitions, 
the structure of human knowledge, our 
common inheritance, rises slowly up- 
ward. 

By taking some pains, the graduate 
student may make his or her usefulness 
to the community greater than it is 
now. Next to the originality of his 
work, the graduate worker prides him- 
self upon its non-utilitarian character. 
Pure scholarship, he thinks, has noth- 
ing to do with the directly and materi- 
ally useful ; and it is perhaps well, even 
for ultimate utility's sake, that he has 
this idea. But there is danger that in 



156 COLLEGE TRAINING 

throwing off all restraints of direct and 
material utility, the worker will turn out 
a product of absolute and total inutility 
to any one in any way. The scholar's 
work must in some way and at some 
time enter helpfully into the thought of 
the world about him, otherwise it is 
like a dream in the sleeper's mind, 
beautiful and delightful to him, but 
quite without reality because quite with- 
out existence for others. 

Another cause for the failure of the 
student's work to enter real existence 
as part of the general world of thought 
is an over-importance attributed to spe- 
cialization, and a misapprehension of 
what true specialization is. The mis- 
taken idea is held that specialization 
consists in finding out about one small 
thing thoroughly by resolutely shutting 



FOR WOMEN. 157 

the eyes to everything else. A fruit- 
ful specialization can, however, proceed 
only upon a broad ground of general 
knowledge, that enables the worker to 
consider his problem in its relation to 
other problems, and thus to keep that 
sense of proportion and balance so ne- 
cessary if even the bare correctness of 
the results of investigation are to be 
assured, to say nothing of their impor- 
tance or appositeness to the needs of a 
time. 

The graduate student should be sure, 
when she takes up her problem, that it 
is a problem worth something to some- 
body to have solved ; she should then 
take a little care over the form and 
finish of her solution. Is there any 
reason why the report of an investiga- 
tion should be released from the rules 



I58 COLLEGE TRAINING 

of clear and correct expression ? Is 
there any reason why the thesis should 
be the synonym for all dulness ? Is 
there any reason why the student should 
scorn the pleasantly flowing style as su- 
perficial, and admire the obscure and 
crabbed as an indication of depth? It 
is safe to assume that there are few 
members of our graduate schools, and 
few instructors in them, who are neces- 
sarily unintelligible simply from the 
closeness and compactness, the weight 
and profundity, of their thought. If 
even a little more care and attention 
than at present were given to form by 
the graduate worker, a most gratifying 
increase in general interest in and re- 
spect for her work would follow, quite 
disproportionate to the slight extra la- 
bor involved. When all research work- 



FOR WOMEN. I59 

ers follow that plan, we shall cease to 
hear the demand from an intelligent 
but wearied public for some Alexan- 
drian fire to ravage the thesis-heaps in 
our libraries, and the investigator will 
take his rightful place as an influence 
in the thought of his time. 

Graduate study, then, if the worker 
does not quite ignore and despise the 
community and its needs and tastes, 
may be found a most useful form of 
activity, to be fostered and encouraged 
as a valuable source of help to the 
community in times of much perplexity 
and doubt. 

To the worker herself, also, the work 
is worth while. The worker with a dis- 
tinct calling will never even ask the 
question ; she does not choose her work, 
but is chosen, and could not do other- 



l60 COLLEGE TRAINING 

wise if she would. The joy of the work 
is her daily satisfaction, and all she 
asks, to be entirely content, is a rea- 
sonable excuse in public opinion of her 
usefulness in pursuing it. 

For the student in general, even with- 
out special call to the work, it is worth 
while to find out, through acquaintance 
with the strict and careful methods of 
the graduate school, what accuracy 
really means, and to learn, even by the 
disappointments and negations of her 
own work, how little the great bulk of 
so-called " science " and " ascertained 
fact " really amounts to. 

It is worth while to the student to 
study after graduation, even without the 
aim of original production. If the stu- 
dent who finds herself without sponta- 
neous and constraining impulses toward 



FOR WOMEN. l6l 

production should make up her mind to 
drop, frankly and fully, all effort that 
way, study with simple acquirement as 
its end would be worth her while, for 
the satisfaction and improvement she 
gets from it, for the further ripening it 
brings about of a culture begun in the 
undergraduate world, and for the feel- 
ing it gives of being more fully at home 
with the best and finest. 



1 62 COLLEGE TRAINING 

CHAPTER VI. 

ALUMNA ASSOCIATIONS. 

THAT the college-woman, trained for 
four years or more in the college- 
group and assimilated in greater or less 
degree to its ideal, should, upon leaving 
that group at graduation, or after grad- 
uate study, unite herself again with 
others of like character and training, is 
not altogether to be explained as a 
result of definite calculation of advan- 
tage. A deeper feeling and impulse is 
at the bottom of it. That " conscious- 
ness of kind," which is the basis of all 
human association, will draw the col- 
lege-graduate to her like in a bond of 
sympathy and intimate relation irre- 



FOR WOMEN. 163 

spective of any actual task she hopes 
to accomplish, or any stated benefit she 
looks for. Human life, so far as we 
can trace it out, began in the group, 
and it has been lived in groups ever 
since. No sooner was the individual 
evolved as a product of group action 
and reaction than he began to unite 
with other individuals in groups again. 
The bond of the kinship group into 
which one came at birth by no choice 
of his own was broken, only to be re- 
placed by the deliberately assumed 
bond of the group based, not upon like- 
ness of blood and descent, but upon 
likeness of thought, taste, and personal 
character. 

By merging himself in the group, the 
individual does not lose his own per- 
sonality, but seems to find it more com- 



164 COLLEGE TRAINING 

plete. He feels an indefinite expansion 
of himself and his powers in association 
with others like himself. The mere 
membership-roll of the group he belongs 
to affects his imagination strongly ; the 
large body thus indicated to the eye rep- 
resents a force that brings to the mem- 
ber an exhilarating sense of potential 
power, which is in no way affected by 
the frequent experience that in hard fact 
the society accomplishes little and the 
single member nothing at all. 

The name of his group represents 
more to the member than simply a 
convenient mark of identification; it is 
a centre about which cluster all sorts of 
vague, indefinite, emotional associations. 
The power of the Name over the minds 
and feelings of men is the subject of 
a long and suggestive chapter in social 



FOR WOMEN. 165 

and individual psychology. The name 
of the person we know does not call 
up in our minds simply the exact sum 
of all those definite qualities that we 
have observed in him from time to 
time, and that have had their share in 
making up our idea of him; it brings 
before consciousness a sort of com- 
posite image made up of certain pre- 
dominant elements in the long sum of 
successively observed qualities, with a 
general background of the less notice- 
able elements blended indistinguishably 
together, the whole suffused with the 
general emotional tone that some lead- 
ing trait in the individual calls up. 
That which we know under the Name, 
in short, is not a photographic copy of 
bald reality, but a work of art, present- 
ing its object as a harmonious whole, 



l66 COLLEGE TRAINING 

with selection of detail, with high lights 
and strong shadows, in the glowing at- 
mosphere of a predominant emotion. 

The Name symbolizes rather than re- 
presents, and depends for its power 
upon the freedom with which each one 
may construct that symbol out of the ele- 
ments that appeal to him most strongly. 
What emotional power is evoked by the 
name of the abstract idea embodied in 
doctrine, — religious, philosophical, or 
social! It is not the simple proposi- 
tion setting forth the bare, logical mean- 
ing of a doctrine that men work and 
die for, but that inextricably blended 
complex of idea and emotion that each 
man for himself has constructed upon 
it. So the group-name, whether it is 
the name of one's country, one's family, 
or the artificial group the individual has 



FOR WOMEN. 167 

elected to belong to, means not merely 
a summing up of its actual elements, 
objects, and methods ; it is a centre of 
personality, whole and compelling with 
the power of personality, to which alle- 
giance is given, and for which affection 
is felt, as for that other symbolic image 
called up by a name which we know 
as the individual. 

The individual not only feels an in- 
creased motive to activity in working in 
the group from the effect it has on his 
emotions, but he finds by association 
with it an increased power of accom- 
plishing what he wants to. The group 
as a whole shares a common purpose, 
so its individual members do not waste 
their efforts by pulling each a different 
way; the group has a common char- 
acter, so that the methods adopted by 



l68 COLLEGE TRAINING 

its members are harmonious, and fit in 
together to the best advantage for the 
common good. 

The group as an instrument of power 
is, besides, more effective than the in- 
dividual, by reason of its influence 
upon the outside community, which feels, 
as the group-member does, the force of 
the collective personality. The collec- 
tive body carries dignity and weight 
in the public estimation ; it is felt as 
a distinct element to be reckoned with. 
What it says will be listened to with 
more respect than the expressions of so 
many detached individuals, and what 
it asks for it is more likely to get 
than would the same number of per- 
sons not united in such a group. 

For some such reasons as these the 
woman-graduate who has, in answer to 



FOR WOMEN. 169 

a natural impulse, united with her kind 
in the alumnae association, will find in 
it an effective and delightful means of 
enlarging and directing her activities. 

In the alumnae-group the alumna 
finds again, with more or less com- 
pleteness, the familiar college atmos- 
phere, and renews, to greater or less 
degree, that consciousness of herself, 
somewhat dimmed perhaps by inter- 
course with the community at large, 
as distinctively the "college-woman." 
She finds in it, too, an important ad- 
ditional means of education ; for, while 
the alumnae association continues to a 
certain extent the general influence ex- 
erted by the college-group, its emphasis 
is different. In the alumnae association 
the union is not so close, group-control 
is not so complete, as in the college- 



I/O COLLEGE TRAINING 

group. Its members are more in touch 
with the world, and more occupied with 
outside interests ; they have had a 
chance to test the applicability of group- 
teaching in the community outside the 
group ; they are more ready to admit 
the result of individual experience. 

The college has already tended to 
broaden character by destroying local 
prejudice and peculiarity ; it has already 
taught individual tolerance, although 
by a sort of group intolerance. These 
processes go further in the alumnae 
association. In the college-group were 
united representatives of different lo- 
calities and different social classes ; in 
the alumnae-group of one college are 
united, besides these, members repre- 
senting different ages, different experi- 
ences, and different periods of college 



FOR WOMEN. 171 

development. The alumnae-group of va- 
rious colleges brings together represen- 
tatives of all these unlikenesses, and 
furthermore, of the differing individu- 
alities of their separate colleges, and 
yet, uniting them all, is the common 
bond of like training and interest, and 
the common ideal of " the college." 
In this broader association, members 
feel the impulse to work for the highest 
and best, regardless of local, social, or 
temporal limitations, and supported by 
the common consciousness of warm in- 
terest and attachment to a common 
cause through a wide and numerous 
circle. 

What such an association may be, 
and can do, both for its own members 
and for the community at large, may be 
illustrated in a brief survey of the 



172 COLLEGE TRAINING 

growth and activities of the Associa- 
tion of Collegiate Alumnae, founded in 
1882, at a time when collegiate training 
for women, even in its undergraduate 
stage, was as yet a new and doubtful 
experiment. Of the four colleges ex- 
clusively for women now represented in 
its membership, Vassar, although the 
pioneer, had graduated but thirteen 
classes, Smith and Wellesley had grad- 
uated but three classes each, while the 
fourth, Bryn Mawr, was not as yet 
opened. 

The college- worn an at that time was 
not only a relatively small element in 
the community, but a relatively isolated 
one. She was looked upon in general 
as a curious artificial product, good 
for school-teaching possibly, but prob- 
ably spoiled for other uses. As for fur- 



FOR WOMEN. 173 

ther study, involving, as was generally 
thought, further removal from every- 
day life, that was distinctly not to be 
thought of by her, since it was a vast in- 
dulgence that had permitted her to use 
so much time in getting that extrava- 
gant luxury, the bachelor's degree. 

To support the woman-graduate in 
the ideals formed during college-life, 
and to help her to apply them in the 
life of the community, the Association 
of Collegiate Alumnse was founded, 
with an initial membership of sixty-six, 
made up of graduates from eight dif- 
ferent institutions, — Oberlin College, 
Vassar College, Cornell University, the 
Universities of Michigan and Wiscon- 
sin, Boston University, Smith College, 
and Wellesley College ; to-day its mem- 
bership is above two thousand, and 



174 COLLEGE TRAINING 

represents fifteen different colleges and 
universities. 

No cast-iron plan of work and organi- 
zation was laid down in the beginning 
for the society ; so that one may see in 
its development the natural reflection 
of contemporary conditions, and of the 
spontaneously felt needs of its mem- 
bers. The purposes of the Association 
were broadly stated at the first meeting 
thus : — 

" The members have organized in order better 
to utilize their privileges in personal education, 
and to perform their duty in respect to popular 
education." 

The first important topic considered 
was the health of women-students, in 
direct response to the great interest 
taken by the general public in that as- 



FOR WOMEN. 175 

pect of the higher education for women. 
It shows how very new and strange, 
even then, was the idea of the feminine 
brain as anything more than a merely 
ornamental appendage, that the general 
feeling should picture a complete wreck 
of the whole physical economy of wo- 
man as a result of her effort to make 
serious use of this doubtful mental 
power. In order to replace a vague 
general impression by some accurate 
knowledge of the matter, the Associa- 
tion sent to a large number of college 
graduates a list of questions, which were 
to be answered by each one out of 
her own personal experience as to her 
health before entering college, during 
the college-life, and after graduation, to 
inherited tendencies, surrounding con- 
ditions, and so forth. Over seven hun- 



I76 COLLEGE TRAINING 

dred answers were received, which were 
tabulated by a professional statistician 
not connected with the Association, to 
insure the greatest possible correctness 
and absence of partisan bias. 

The results of this investigation were 
embodied in the Sixteenth Annual Re- 
port of the Massachusetts Bureau of 
Statistics of Labor, and may be summed 
up, in their most general form, in the 
words of that report, as follows : — 

" Female graduates of our colleges and uni- 
versities do not seem to show, as the result of 
their college duties and studies, any marked dif- 
ference in general health likely to be reported 
by an equal number of women engaged in other 
kinds of work, or, in fact, of women generally, 
without regard to occupation followed." 

Some of the special results were in- 
teresting. It was found that while 



FOR WOMEN. I77 

19.58 per cent of the whole number 
answering had deteriorated in health 
during the college-course, 21.13 per 
cent had shown an improvement, while 
the remaining 59.29 per cent were prac- 
tically unaffected. Of assigned causes 
of ill-health, ante-collegiate conditions, 
inherited tendencies, constitutional pre- 
dispositions, etc., played the largest 
part, neglect of the conditions of phys- 
ical well-being the next, and strictly 
mental exertion the least of all. Finally 
it may be mentioned that the health 
record of children of alumnae was found 
to be exceptionally high, and the death- 
rate notably low. By carrying through 
this investigation in such a painstaking 
and non-partisan manner, the Associ- 
ation rendered a valuable service to the 
college and to the community as well, 



178 COLLEGE TRAINING 

in relieving the popular mind of its 
apprehensions regarding the effect of 
college training on the health of the 
woman-student. 

Along the same line of interest the 
Association undertook to find out what 
the colleges were doing for the physical 
training of their students, and published 
the results of their inquiries in a sched- 
ule that surprises us to-day, — accus- 
tomed as we are to the elaborate and 
complete preparations made in our col- 
leges for physical training, athletic 
sports, and so on, — by the slenderness 
of provision it shows as then made for 
such things. 

The health of girls in preparatory 
schools was also the subject of discus- 
sion and investigation by the Associa- 
tion, and certain conditions desirable 



FOR WOMEN. 179 

for the physical well-being of students 
were stated in a set of recommendations 
that was sent around widely to schools 
and to parents. There is probably no 
doubt but that the greater attention 
paid in colleges and schools of the 
present day to physical training and 
other requisites to physical health is in 
no small degree due to the interest and 
work of this Association. 

Next in importance to the question of 
health in the public mind was the ques- 
tion of occupation for the woman-gradu- 
ate. Let it be granted that she succeeds 
in coming out of college with unim- 
paired health and vigor, of what use is 
her training to be to her in the practical 
work of earning a living ? was a fre- 
quent query. The subject of occupa- 
tions, of interest to the graduate herself 



l80 COLLEGE TRAINING 

also in a very pressing way, received 
early attention from the Association. 
Information was sought by it as to lines 
of work, qualifications necessary and 
desirable for engaging in them, and re- 
muneration to be gained from them. A 
local branch of the Association carried 
on for two years a special study of occu- 
pations, with particular consideration of 
talent, preliminary education, special 
training, — how and where obtained, — 
demand, remuneration, advantages, and 
disadvantages. Another local branch 
studied through a season the subject of 
women's wages, and the general asso- 
ciation took up the same study. An 
investigation was made into conditions 
of wage-earning of women who had re- 
ceived collegiate or other special train- 
ing beyond the grammar-school course, 



FOR WOMEN. l8l 

with reference to actual service ren- 
dered, length of continuance in a place, 
actual rate of wages received, and com- 
parative rates of wages of men render- 
ing service in corresponding positions. 
The results of this investigation were 
published, as the health statistics had 
been, by the Massachusetts Bureau of 
the Statistics of Labor. As a practical 
feature of the same general work, the 
Association established a Bureau of Oc- 
cupations for the purpose of putting 
high-class, specialized talent in commu- 
nication with those who wished to secure 
its services. 

Another line of work taken up by the 
Association was the encouragement of 
study after graduation. It established 
clubs for regular study in subjects al- 
ready pursued in the college, and also 



1 82 COLLEGE TRAINING 

in subjects of growing importance hith- 
erto neglected, or omitted altogether 
in the college-course. Notable among 
these latter were the social sciences, 
then receiving much less attention than 
now even in the colleges for men. 

Work done in groups of graduates 
more or less occupied with other mat- 
ters, and with more or less guidance 
from capable leaders, was not, however, 
enough to fulfil the highest ideal of 
graduate study. Devotion of the entire 
time, the instruction and guidance of 
acknowledged masters and discoverers, 
was necessary for that. The Associa- 
tion took much pains to bring before its 
members such information as was to be 
had concerning opportunities offered in 
universities, both in this country and 
abroad, for graduate study. In 1889 



FOR WOMEN. 183 

the Association founded two fellowships, 
to be awarded annually to the winners 
in a competition before committees of 
experts. These fellowships encouraged 
application to the higher studies, not 
only by enabling two persons yearly to 
take advantage of the best opportuni- 
ties for graduate study offered here and 
abroad, but by inducing many more, in 
preparation for the competition, to take 
up advanced work, which, once begun, 
was apt to be continued in default of 
the fellowship by some other means. 
The last Report of the Committee on 
Fellowships (1896) shows that the har- 
vest of original research and investiga- 
tion brought forth by that competition 
is rich and promising far beyond the 
bounds of recognition in fellowships, 
and that the record made in foreign 



184 COLLEGE TRAINING 

universities by the holders of fellow- 
ships is honorable and gratifying. 

As the Association grew, changes in 
organization were bound to occur. In 
the first years of the Association's ex- 
istence all accessible woman-graduates 
were none too many to form an effec- 
tive working association ; and the spirit 
of the institutions to be classed as col- 
leges, even with a fairly broad allow- 
ance as to what constituted a college, 
was in sufficient contrast to that of 
the outside community to be useful by 
organization as a definite force. To- 
day, however, if the Association were 
to open its doors as widely as it did 
formerly, it would not only become un- 
wieldy from sheer force of numbers, but 
by keeping to the old standard while 
the general community has advanced, 



FOR WOMEN. 185 

— owing partly to the wider diffusion 
of collegiate training, — it would lose 
that position of relative elevation above 
the general level that gives it the right 
and power of leadership. The Associ- 
ation, then, has found it necessary to 
make its conditions of membership more 
and more strict, until now the seem- 
ingly strange condition of affairs is 
reached in which the Association is 
found excluding from its membership 
institutions usually ranked higher than 
some already within it. Much of the 
criticism that may be levelled at such 
an apparent anomaly loses consider- 
able of its force by the fact that this 
very change of attitude and seeming 
inconsistency is a token of growth and 
health in the Association, showing that 
it is mindful of its duty to improve it- 



1 86 COLLEGE TRAINING 

self as time goes on, and does not 
linger in the immature stage of devel- 
opment of its early years. 

Another incident of growth is the 
increasing localization of activities in 
" branch " work. As the membership 
of the Association grew, members were 
more and more brought within conve- 
nient meeting distance of one another 
in and about the larger centres of pop- 
ulation ; and the same change went on 
that was seen in the development of 
early man, — when the totem-brethren, 
scattered at first among stranger-com- 
munities by their peculiar marriage- 
customs, yet recognizing the bond of 
totem-kinship when chance wanderings 
threw them in each other's way, became 
localized in villages, and were no longer 
simply kinsmen, but neighbors. 



FOR WOMEN. 187 

By this growth of the Association, 
several modifications of character were 
brought about. The local group, or- 
ganized as a " branch " of the general 
society, began to interest itself in local 
conditions as the general society could 
not. It belonged to the soil, so to 
speak, and became part of the com- 
munity, with community duties and in- 
terests, so that association work, which 
had before been largely and necessarily 
for the protection and advancement of 
its members and of the collegiate class, 
became more especially work for the 
outside community. Indeed, the day 
for such protection of a collegiate class 
had about gone by, owing partly to the 
very activity with which this Associa- 
tion had already engaged in that work. 
There is no longer any serious doubt 



1 88 COLLEGE TRAINING 

but that women are physically able to 
pass through the college-course ; school- 
teaching is no longer the sole occupa- 
tion for the college-graduate ; the taste 
for study has become general enough 
so that distinctively collegiate clubs for 
definite work of that kind are no longer 
so necessary ; it is generally felt that 
such reading and practice as could be 
done profitably in a club without special 
instruction will be done spontaneously 
and as a matter of course by every cul- 
tivated woman for herself ; university 
after university has opened its doors to 
women for graduate work, and fellow- 
ship after fellowship is open to be com- 
peted for by them. 

The college-woman, in short, is by 
this time abundantly able to take care 
of herself, and of her own wants and 



FOR WOMEN. 189 

needs ; she is at liberty, then, without 
losing her distinctive character [and the 
helpful influence that arises from it, to 
go out into the community, and care for 
its needs. 

The local groups of members of the 
Association formed into branches, while 
they owed allegiance to the general as- 
sociation and were expected to help in 
its general work, were left free to follow 
out such local work as appealed to them 
most strongly. Each was able, then, to 
take up what lay nearest to hand in its 
own particular locality. 

The general association had studied 
closely "the college," — its ideals, its 
standards, what it could and could not 
do, how it could be best administered; 
it had discussed what could be done by 
the college-woman for the public schools, 



I9O COLLEGE TRAINING 

for the preparatory schools, for peda- 
gogics, for industrial education, for the 
English language. Measures had been 
taken to influence legislative and other 
action to prevent the springing up of 
weak institutions claiming to be col- 
leges, yet unfitted to do collegiate work ; 
efforts had been exerted to induce al- 
ready existing colleges to raise their 
standards, and make their degrees 
more valuable. The branches, follow- 
ing along these lines, took up such of 
the problems as were presented most 
pressingly in their own neighborhoods. 
Branches established near colleges and 
universities have made these their spe- 
cial centres of interest in one way and 
another. They have contended against 
low standards and against "machine" 
rule ; they have worked to supply defi- 



FOR WOMEN. 191 

ciencies in equipment ; they have af- 
forded the aid of their sympathy and 
co-operation to woman-students at work 
near them. Other branches have bent 
their energies to the reform of the pub- 
lic school system, fighting machine rule 
there also, securing the proper sanita- 
tion of schoolhouses, and bringing about 
the representation of the college-woman 
in educational affairs by demanding 
her presence on committees, governing 
boards, and so forth, and by urging her 
exemption as bearer of a college degree 
from State or county examinations re- 
quired to obtain a license for teaching. 
One branch in a large city set on foot 
and carried through successfully a pro- 
ject for the establishment of a free pub- 
lic library in the place, which had, to its 
shame, been up to this time without 



192 COLLEGE TRAINING 

one; and this branch also did the fur- 
ther notable work of securing collegiate 
preparatory training for girls in the pub- 
lic schools. Other branches, in com- 
munities where the college as an object 
of interest and aspiration to girls was 
practically unknown, set themselves to 
arouse interest and awaken aspiration 
by various means. Prizes were offered 
for the best passing of examinations in 
college-preparatory studies ; meetings 
were held to set forth to school-girls the 
pleasures, advantages, and opportunities 
of the collegiate life, and information 
helpful in choosing a college was col- 
lected and placed within easy reach. 

The educational movement known 
briefly as " University Extension " is 
distinctly a work for others, — for the 
general community, — and is noticeably 



FOR WOMEN. I93 

prominent in branch work, and in the 
maturely developed general association. 
This subject appears to have been men- 
tioned first in the general association 
in 1889. Several of the branches have 
taken up the work vigorously, establish- 
ing course after course of lectures, and 
extending their benefits to wider and 
wider circles. 

Another line of work for the better- 
ment of the community in a broadly 
educational way is carried on in the 
College Settlement, and in this work 
many branches have heartily engaged. 
They have made contributions for run- 
ning expenses, and have founded fellow- 
ships in settlements already established ; 
they have also founded the settlements 
themselves where none existed before. 
Certain branches have established home 



194 COLLEGE TRAINING 

libraries as centres of information and 
instruction to the children of the poor ; 
certain others, getting more and more 
off the line of purely educational im- 
provement into general social improve- 
ment, have used their influence to have 
more park room supplied in crowded 
quarters of cities, and to have laws 
passed protective of women and the 
young in mercantile employments. 

Looking over as a whole the work of 
the college-woman organized in groups, 
it is seen to be no mean achievement, 
though the college-woman herself feels 
that it is almost nothing in comparison 
with what she would like to do. But 
whether little or much has actually been 
accomplished, the group of college- 
women is a centre of power that may 
not be exerted for a time, or that may 



FOR WOMEN. I95 

be misdirected for a time, but that, if 
the group is kept together, and its or- 
ganization preserved intact, if even by- 
social intercourse only, will some time 
and on some occasion prove itself to be 
just the one force needed to destroy 
something wrong and undesirable, and 
to establish something right and neces- 
sary. 

The especial function of the alumnas- 
group seems to be to relate the college 
to the community. The college works 
to develop in its member the highest 
possible perfection, regardless of the 
general level of the community ; in 
fact, it means to lift its student above 
the community. The alumnae-group, 
standing on the high level where the 
college has brought it, does not so 
much try, as a group, to reach higher 



I96 COLLEGE TRAINING 

levels itself, as to bring the community 
after it up to its level. The college 
exerts its influence upward and inward ; 
the alumnae-group, in completest fulfil- 
ment of its function, exerts its influence 
downward and outward. 

The alumnae-group is not capable of 
continuing the work of the college in 
the precise line of direction taken by 
the college. Its members are too much 
engaged outside the group to devote 
their time as students in the group ; 
for the same reason, those in the group 
who by natural ability and training are 
qualified to give strictly collegiate in- 
struction in the group have not the 
time to do so. Nor is the group as a 
whole, since it is composed of the non- 
professional as well as the professional, 
the ordinary as well as the extraordi- 



FOR WOMEN. 197 

nary, capable of conducting directly 
with the best results the special tech- 
nical processes of the higher education 
for others. 

Its power of general supervision and 
criticism is its legitimate one ; and it 
will probably be found, as years go by, 
that it will do less and less in pursu- 
ing, as a group, the original research 
that is the especial work of the grad- 
uate school ; less and less cf the per- 
sonal direction of the higher studies 
involved in the granting of fellowships ; 
more and more in the way of seeing 
that the colleges conduct their work 
under the proper general conditions ; 
that they preserve a high standard, and 
sustain themselves financially in trying 
to do so ; that the schools are what they 
should be ; and that educational advan- 



I98 COLLEGE TRAINING 

tages are shared by the less fortunate 
and the less enlightened. In doing 
this the group will be doing the work 
it can do best, and will be adding to 
the work of the college something that 
the college itself cannot do. 



FOR WOMEN. I99 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE COLLEGE-TRAINED MOTHER. 

IT is a singular circumstance that 
while " the mother " is such a sa- 
cred object to popular feeling, the defi- 
nite idea of her and her duties and 
powers held in the popular mind is 
found upon analysis to be an exceed- 
ingly limited and not an especially ele- 
vated one. In popular thought the 
distinctively maternal qualities are com- 
prised in the power of physical repro- 
duction, and in a certain elemental and 
primitive passion of protection and de- 
fence of offspring, which is the psychi- 
cal counterpart of the physical function, 
and which works not as the result of 



200 COLLEGE TRAINING 

reason, calculation, or experience, but 
by an intuition that is awakened at the 
very birth of the child. For mother- 
hood, then, in the general opinion, no 
especial preparation is needed. Any 
woman of fairly healthy body, what- 
ever her disposition, ability, or train- 
ing, is considered amply fitted for the 
duties of a mother ; and, in fact, any 
woman, who from lack of intelligence 
or character seems likely to make a 
failure of any sort of non-domestic 
work, is usually advised to take upon 
herself the wifely and maternal office 
as the fitting opportunity of usefulness 
and happiness for her. And yet to 
motherhood in its highest sense be- 
longs much more. It involves, in 
addition to the physical passion and in- 
stinct of animal life in general, a power 



FOR WOMEN. 20I 

of rational and moral guidance and con- 
trol peculiar to humanity, to be used 
in the truly sacred work of lifting up 
to humanity from the animal level that 
crude lump of possibilities, the child. 
This task is one of the most complex 
and exacting known ; and for its accom- 
plishment the mother, far from need- 
ing no especial ability and preparation, 
requires the most varied talent and the 
most thorough training. 

The peculiar fitness of the college- 
woman for this function is largely over- 
looked, owing, no doubt, to the cir- 
cumstance that the popular idea of 
motherhood is such a limited one. 
With a broader idea in one's mind of 
the mother's duties, it is easily seen 
that the college exerts certain special in- 
fluences particularly useful in preparing 



202 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the mother for her task. \xhe college- 
woman will not, in the first place, enter 
upon wifehood because she has nothing 
else to do, nor will she be a mother by 
accident. If she takes up those duties 
it will be because she feels a special 
inclination to them, that is in itself a 
good sign that they will be lovingly and 
carefully fulfilled. She will, besides, 
realize the difficulty and complexity of 
these duties. She has learned too much 
of the intricacies of the human body, 
the human mind, and human society, 
to think that she can care properly for 
a developing human creature, even a 
"very little one," without a thorough 
knowledge of conditions and circum- 
stances. The college-woman studies 
her child in mind and body. That 
she succeeds in the latter branch is 



FOR WOMEN. 203 

shown by the fact that her children 
are healthier, and survive in greater 
proportion to the number of births, than 
children in the community as a whole. 
The results of her study of the child's 
mind cannot, in the nature of the case, 
be formulated so definitely ; yet notwith- 
standing the possible crudities, extrava- 
gances, and false assumptions of " child- 
study" as carried on to-day, there can 
be no doubt that the effort really to find 
out something of the laws of mental 
growth and development in the child 
will be followed by more useful results 
than come from the careless ignorance 
that there are any such laws, and the 
careless persistence in their violation. 

In taking up her work of parenthood, 
the college-woman finds that those gen- 
eral traits the college has tended to de- 



204 COLLEGE TRAINING 

velop in her own character are just the 
ones fitted to give her power over her 
child, and the means of dealing with 
him. The instinctive maternal love of 
the untrained mother will, it is true, 
awaken in the child an answering re- 
gard that beautifies his character, and 
lifts it to higher levels. However un- 
learned, undisciplined, and unwise it 
may be, the loving mother-spirit is a 
never-to-be-forgotten influence in the 
child's life. But how often that spirit 
is enfeebled in its effect by lack of 
reason and control ! How often the 
mother is belittled in her child's eyes 
by the narrow prejudice, the personal 
whim, the ignorant and foolish impulse, 
that sway her, making the child half- 
despise even while he loves her ! How 
often she fails in her guidance of him 



FOR WOMEN. 205 

because she feels and he feels that he 
has really grown beyond her powers of 
mind and character! The college-wo- 
man has had offered her the possibility 
of ridding herself of these belittling 
characteristics. The mother, first of 
all, must be absolutely and entirely 
above the level of the child, strong in 
the conscious power of control ; and 
this the college-training, social and in- 
tellectual, has given her the opportu- 
nity to be. The college has tended to 
develop in her a personality that can 
stand in and for itself. She has learned 
in the college to know and use herself ; 
she has learned to know and to deal 
with others in a spirit of sympathetic 
comprehension and tolerance ; she has 
learned to suppress personal whim and 
personal exaction, and to regard wider 



206 COLLEGE TRAINING 

and higher interests than those that 
centre in herself; her mind is trained 
and stored so that she does not feel at 
a disadvantage when confronted with 
the growing and expanding mind of 
the child. Such a mother, with char- 
acter and opinions of her own, the 
child respects as he could not the 
mother who always looks to some one 
else for her rule of action, — to her hus- 
band, her social circle, or even her own 
children, and has no opinions, or means 
of forming any. 

The college not only tends to give 
the future mother a feeling of respect 
for her task, and a power of character 
to deal with it, but a special outfit of 
acquirement for use in building up es- 
pecial elements in the child's character. 
The college, like the mother, has for its 



FOR WOMEN. 207 

function not so much the fitting of its 
pupil for some particular activity of life, 
as for life in general ; not so much the 
development of some one talent or fac- 
ulty, as of the whole man or woman. 
Both try to make the cultivation of 
mind and character not a means to 
some achievement or acquirement, but 
an end in itself, desirable for its own 
sake; both try to develop power in 
general, leaving to definite occasions 
the application of power. The college 
tries to teach its pupil not merely to 
know certain things, but to take up a 
certain attitude of mind toward things 
in general ; it tries to instil a certain 
spirit that shall give meaning and 
beauty to all acquirement, and to dif- 
fuse a certain atmosphere in which all 
objects of thought shall stand luminous 



208 COLLEGE TRAINING 

in their true relations. The formation 
of tone and temper, of spirit and atmos- 
phere, is also one of the most important 
processes in the development of the 
child. Whether for good or evil, this 
process is begun at the very dawn of 
intelligence, and is carried on under 
every influence of home and surround- 
ings that the child is subjected to. 
Here, then, the college-trained mother 
has her golden opportunity, — to prevent 
from the beginning the growth of the 
base and the trivial in spirit and atti- 
tude of mind, and to foster the noble, 
the generous, and the liberal. In our 
time, the dangers of an exclusively ma- 
terial civilization appear to be pressing 
closer and closer upon us. We are 
warned day by day of the evils and 
harms of the purely mercantile spirit. 



FOR WOMEN. 209 

We send our young men to the college 
to get some acquaintance with and love 
for the ideal before they are over- 
whelmed in the bustle of the market- 
place. Suppose, however, that each 
child, boy or girl, had from earliest 
youth daily contact with the ideal in 
the person of a broadly trained mother, 
would not the lesson be learned in a 
way impossible otherwise ? would it not 
be printed in characters that no after 
influence could wholly efface? The 
college-trained mother will teach her 
son that there are higher ends in life 
than money-making; she will teach her 
daughter that there are other sources 
of interest than dress and show, and 
other occupations besides hunting for a 
husband. She can give them personal 
guidance in following out these higher 



2IO COLLEGE TRAINING 

interests. Her well-stocked mind is a 
never-failing storehouse of resource for 
occupying, amusing, and instructing 
them, so that they need never fall into 
that deadly vacancy which causes most 
of the mischief, vice, and crime com- 
mitted in the world. A child constantly 
provided with something wholesome and 
interesting to do, is with the greater 
difficulty tempted into coarse and fool- 
ish employments. 

If the mother is prepared to con- 
duct her child's education herself, as 
the college-trained mother would be, 
she is able to keep him at home, under 
her own instruction, until some leading 
traits of character are formed, and some 
mental fibre established. From this 
would come a great gain to the schools 
as well as to the children themselves. 



FOR WOMEN. 211 

Under present conditions, children en- 
ter the schools with too little maturity 
of mind and character to be dealt with 
successfully in masses, as the teacher 
must deal with them. The mother, in 
the narrow circle of her little home- 
school, knows every child with the most 
intimate knowledge, and feels for it that 
tender interest in its progress and wel- 
fare that the teacher, with the best will 
in the world, cannot feel for all her nu- 
merous flock alike. She can give, as 
the teacher cannot, that attention to 
individual needs and wants, that equal 
and spontaneous interest in each, that 
is so necessary in the teaching of the 
young child. Thus the child kept at 
home during its earlier years of learn- 
ing secures a more perfect development, 
while the school, relieved of over-pres- 



212 COLLEGE TRAINING 

sure, can deal to greater advantage with 
the pupils it retains, and can deal to 
especially greater advantage with those 
who come to it later after this careful 
training at home. At a suitable period 
in the child's life there is a distinct and 
necessary educative influence to be 
gained for him by sending him out be- 
yond the bounds of home, to come in 
contact to some extent with strangers, 
and to be taught by them ; but this in- 
fluence is as bad when exerted too soon, 
as it is good when it comes as the natu- 
ral sequel to proper home preparation. 

What a race brought up by well- 
disciplined mothers would be we can 
barely imagine; since motherhood has 
always been, and still is, so largely a 
matter of accident and instinct. We 
may see enough, however, to encourage 



FOR WOMEN. 213 

us in thinking that such a race would 
be an incalculable improvement on the 
present one. It would, we may guess, 
be strong and wholesome physically, 
strong and clean morally, strong and 
fine mentally ; it would spontaneously 
and naturally take to the good influ- 
ences in the world, and quietly ignore 
and reject the bad ones, and so make 
life not the fierce struggle it now is to 
advance even a pace or two beyond 
the manners and morals of the brute, 
but a harmonious and delightful growth 
into the more and more perfect man. 



214 COLLEGE TRAINING 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE COLLEGE-WOMAN AS A SOCIAL 
INFLUENCE. 

THE nervous critic who objects to 
the collegiate training of women 
because, as he thinks, it materially les- 
sens their chance of motherhood, and 
so their usefulness to the community, 
seems to forget that there are other 
avenues than this one through which 
women not only may, but are expected, 
to influence the social whole for its 
good. The mother's activity is not 
strictly confined to the circle of her 
home ; she has, besides, a place in the 
community that she must fill according 
to its requirements. The single woman, 



FOR WOMEN. 215 

too, has laid upon her the burden of 
social duties, that are made particularly- 
exacting and heavy because she is com- 
paratively free from family cares. 

This general service of the commu- 
nity as a whole is as important in its 
place perhaps as the mother's work; 
it is, possibly, as necessary that some 
should attend to the well-being and 
improvement oi>tho^e already in the 
social grpufi, as that some should bring 
into existence additional members for 
it. In this former task the single wo- 
man has her great and necessary func- 
tion ; since she may come to it with 
hands free to take hold wherever she 
is needed, in a way that the mother, 
busy, and rightly busy, at her own ap- 
pointed work, cannot. If the college- 
woman does not, then, in every instance 



2l6 COLLEGE TRAINING 

marry, it should be a cause of rejoicing, 
not of alarm, to the community, which 
is likely, on this account, to get a direct 
and undivided service, much to its ad- 
vantage. 

If the training given in the college 
is useful for the work of the mother, 
it is no less useful as a preparation 
for work for society at large. Looking 
about at prevailing social conditions, 
we see on every side opportunity to use, 
and crying need for, the very gifts the 
college-woman has to bestow. 

The general fault of our civilization 
is, that the people as a whole lack the 
discrimination and taste necessary to 
know the fine from the vulgar, the beau- 
tiful from the ugly, so that they may 
insist upon the one, and refuse to put 
up with the other. Much that is de- 



FOR WOMEN. 217 

basing and belittling in our public life 
is due to the ignorance of anything 
better. Much of our difficulty with the 
great political problems that confront 
us is due to the general lack of respect 
for the expert in intricate matters, such 
as finance and taxation, that call for 
wide research and a disinterested spirit, 
rather than for the suddenly reached 
and emotionally guided conclusions of 
the average unlettered citizen. The 
college-man may go directly into the 
political field if he wishes, and use his 
influence there to teach directly that 
sense for relative values that the col- 
lege has already taught him ; the col- 
lege-woman, if she may not do that, has 
an opportunity to do something toward 
bettering the general state of things by 
helping to form a general opinion that 



2l8 COLLEGE TRAINING 

shall recognize these relative values, 
and refuse to permit the unlearned to 
carry on affairs that require learning, 
the coarse and vulgar to arrange mat- 
ters that require taste and cultivation, 
or the mercenary and mean to conduct 
business that calls for the purest integ- 
rity and the strictest sense of honor. 

It is our boast in this country that 
we have no " classes ; " but by now cer- 
tain broad contrasts are seen to exist 
between social groups that enable us to 
make certain rough distinctions on the 
basis of differences more or less su- 
perficial, more or less transitory and 
ill-defined. A distinctively large-town 
population has arisen, with its own spe- 
cial characteristics, and offering its own 
special problems ; a small-town popula- 
tion is to be recognized with traits be- 



FOR WOMEN. 219 

longing peculiarly to itself; a sparsely- 
settled country district affords yet an- 
other variety of the social group. De- 
gree of wealth may also be taken as 
a basis for distinction of social groups. 
" The rich " and " the poor " are rela- 
tive terms only, but they suggest certain 
broad differences that appear clearly in 
popular thought. For all these classes 
the college-woman has something to do ; 
so that in whatever community her lot 
is cast, she need not feel that she is 
out of place, or that her preparation 
has been wasted. 

In our great cities is to be found a 
class of persons possessing large wealth, 
but notoriously deficient in any rational 
idea of disposing of it. The foreign 
visitor records, as a first impression, 
the lack of distinction, of charm, of 



220 COLLEGE TRAINING 

variety, in our so-called "highest cir- 
cles." He observes a frank and un- 
blushing reduction of everything to the 
money standard. The most prominent 
man or woman in this realm, he notices, 
is the richest man or woman ; the de- 
light of social entertainment is meas- 
ured by its expense ; art, music, and lit- 
erature are matters of money value, and 
nowhere does he see that free and spon- 
taneous enjoyment that comes from the 
exercise of genuine intellect and taste. 

The college-woman who mingles in 
that society has perhaps the hardest 
task of all, yet it is one worthy to be 
undertaken. She has first to combat 
the prejudice that is felt against the 
traditional "blue-stocking," untidy in 
dress, uncouth of manner, and heavy in 
conversation. She must be of the 



FOR WOMEN. 221 

world worldly in dress, appearance, and 
manner before she can get a hearing; 
she must employ the finest tact and 
the most delicate discrimination. Sim- 
ply by making herself liked and re- 
ceived with pleasure in this materialistic 
society, she is accomplishing great 
good ; since she is introducing there the 
idea that character may be a force as 
well as money, and that true gentlehood 
and courtesy may hold its own as well 
as the crass insolence that hardly masks 
itself under the veil of society manner. 

It is a help to society, and especially 
to the feminine half of it, to be shown 
also that a woman's true life and real in- 
terests are not over at the close of the 
blossoming period ; and, indeed, that 
the "blossoming period" itself is not 
over so quickly as where the mind has 



222 COLLEGE TRAINING 

nothing to feed on. The studious 
woman, with plans and interests of her 
own that do not depend upon the glow 
of youth for their savor, does not grow 
old in feeling when the period of natu- 
ral physical effervescence is past. This 
youthfulness of feeling in turn reacts 
upon the physical organization, breath- 
ing into it continually a spirit of youth 
and life that is felt and recognized by 
everybody that comes within the scope 
of its influence. Such a woman shows 
to society that a pleasing type of woman- 
hood may exist that is not dependent 
on flattery and good opinion for hap- 
piness, and that can be something to 
others because it is something in itself. 
The college-woman has also a duty 
to perform in teaching society some 
rational and satisfactory means of en- 



FOR WOMEN. 223 

joyment. A truly rich and full social 
life is the crowning flower of civilization, 
and wealth is to be valued most highly 
for the opportunities it affords for this 
by the leisure it brings ; but that leisure 
and that opportunity, so full of promise 
in their possibilities, are, under present 
conditions, how generally and shame- 
fully squandered in toilsome nothings 
and expensive emptiness! 

With her rich and varied interests, 
her broad view of the life of the world 
in its general currents, her elevation 
above the money standard, her ability 
to judge by means of her own taste and 
discernment between the fine and the 
vulgar, the college-woman would seem 
to be the natural educator of the neg- 
lected rich in the arts of true refine- 
ment and luxury. Perhaps as a result 



224 COLLEGE TRAINING 

of her teaching, the "variety-show" 
and the cheap "problem-play" would 
cease to be considered the satisfactory 
exposition of comedy and tragedy, while 
the "new journalism" and the litera- 
ture of decadence would cease to flour- 
ish in a society that had learned some 
of the canons of taste that the college- 
graduate has been trained in. 

Is it too remote a fancy to look upon 
the college-woman as the lineal descen- 
dant of the old-time lady of the salon ? 
Conversation in general society to-day 
is stupid because there are so few of its 
members who have anything to talk 
about. The last-century Frenchwoman 
of the grande monde, without passing 
ostensibly through the regular discipline 
of direct collegiate training, had attained 
the essential results of that discipline, 



FOR WOMEN. 225 

by reason of her real interest in the 
things of the mind, and her industry, 
taste, and skill in pursuit of them. 

The pure culture she devoted herself 
to, the fine taste she had by nature, the 
college tries to impart to its graduate ; 
and the graduate in turn may be a cen- 
tre of these influences for others. 

The college-woman, isolated in the 
average group of the wealthy in our 
modern society, would perhaps have a 
hard time of it in trying to establish 
there a salon of the old-time character. 
She can, by herself, lead such a group 
only a little way on the road to better 
things, and must be contented for a time 
simply to be accepted there. Little by 
little, by a gradual infiltration of the 
educated class, and especially of an 
educated class of women, changes will 



226 COLLEGE TRAINING 

begin to take place that will show an 
advance to a higher level ; but these 
changes will take time, patience, and, 
above all, tact for their accomplishment. 
The college-woman must introduce in 
the most gracious and apparently oc- 
casional way, the intellectual element 
that, once received and appreciated, will 
brighten and give zest to society; she 
must show her cultivation rather by air 
and atmosphere than by a forced ob- 
trusion of profound topics on public 
attention ; she must, above all, be her- 
self, frank, natural, and unaffected, or 
she will fail to exert the influence that 
truth, sincerity, and wholeness of pur- 
pose always insure, and that is lost as 
soon as one begins to palter and pre- 
tend, and work one's plans out on a 
foreign and hence uncertain basis. 



FOR WOMEN. 227 

The rich in large places have learned 
to greater or less extent the outer forms 
and observances of a refined society. 
In certain smaller communities, how- 
ever, the class of wealth and leisure has 
brought to a newly acquired position the 
manners, habits, and customs of the 
rude, untrained, and unorganized social 
condition from which they sprang. In 
such a society there is little mingling of 
young and old in relations of mutually 
helpful and stimulating intercourse, little 
observance of polite forms that sug- 
gest, even where they do not truthfully 
express, general courtesy, mutual def- 
erence, and innate refinement. The 
college-woman has usually learned some- 
thing at the college of the graces and 
the proprieties, even if she were lacking 
in knowledge of them before, and so has 



228 COLLEGE TRAINING 

much to do in such a society, and in 
known instances has done much. She 
can help to organize a social life that 
is conducted, in its externals at least, 
with dignity and decorum, under those 
forms that follow laws of beauty, pro- 
priety, and fitness in social relation, that 
have been worked out through ages of 
human association. She can help to 
form a social opinion that disapproves 
of a separation of the old from the 
young in society, as leaving the former 
to a deplorable stagnation of interest 
and a general feeling of displacement 
from social activity; the latter to an 
unchecked play of primitive instincts 
that will lead to all sorts of difficulties 
and troubles. 

There is a large and growing class 
in our cities and towns — people of 



FOR WOMEN. 229 

wealth perhaps, or of moderate means 
— who are filled with a desire for im- 
provement and for a true intellectual 
life. From this class is formed the 
"woman's club/' that new and flourish- 
ing institution of our day, which stands 
close to the college in the prevalence 
and scope of its influence. Here, too, 
is a good work for the college-graduate. 
Many of these clubs are made up of 
women who, deprived in the early pe- 
riod of life of our latter-day advantages, 
are unaccustomed to mental work, and 
uneducated in standards of attainment. 
They need leaders who know, and can 
tell them, what is worth doing and what 
is not ; what they are capable of doing, 
and what they are not; what it means 
to learn and to study, and what it does 
not. Improvement in intellectual mat- 



23O COLLEGE TRAINING 

ters will scarcely come where persons 
without training, with mediocre capacity 
and undeveloped taste, meet only to ex- 
change their own limited opinions, which, 
in the very endeavor for improvement, 
are not even simple and natural expres- 
sions of actual thought and experience, 
and so for this reason valuable, but 
are artificial and valueless attempts at 
the " literary " and the " scientific." The 
college-woman may teach the members 
of her club, what has been taught her, 
that an abstract from an encyclopaedia 
is not an essay; that the first requi- 
site for good writing or talking upon a 
subject is definite and distinct thought 
about it; and that if one really has 
something to say, the simplest and 
most unaffected way of saying it is the 
best. 



FOR WOMEN. 23I 

Another feature of our time is the 
" ladies' class," which may become the 
means of grace or the reverse, accord- 
ing to its conductor. With the college- 
woman more frequent both as lecturer 
and auditor, the " ladies' class " will 
cease to be, as it so often is now, the 
centre of misinformation, of shallow 
treatment of deep themes, of dull re- 
hearsal of dry and disconnected fact, 
and of dogmatic deliverance upon sub- 
jects where dogmatism should be known 
to be impossible. The college-woman 
may help to dispel the superstitious 
reverence for "the book" and "the 
teacher," which is so touching and so 
saddening to see in many women. The 
various crazes and fanaticisms that 
-rage all over our country, the vari- 
ous prophets that gather following, do 



232 COLLEGE TRAINING 

so because of a lack in the general com- 
munity of knowledge and taste to detect 
falsity, crudity, and extravagance, as the 
college-woman, from her training, should 
be especially fitted to do. 

The college-woman who goes back to 
a quiet country home has had bestowed 
upon her much advice and much sym- 
pathy. It has long been thought that 
her place there was a hard one ; that 
she had, by her college training, grown 
out of touch with the community, so that 
she could not, if she would, get close 
to it again. It is pleasant to reflect 
that while some such state of things did 
exist in the early days of the higher 
education for women, it has largely 
ceased to exist now; and the college- 
woman goes back gladly, and is re- 
ceived gladly, in a community that has 



FOR WOMEN. 233 

learned to know her, and to sympathize 
to some extent with her ideals. 

The greater proportion of our college- 
graduates are country-bred, and their 
return through the last twenty years to 
their homes has undoubtedly had its 
effect upon the country community. 
There is scarcely a small village or 
scattered farming region that does not 
offer its opportunity for useful work to 
the college-woman. There are interests 
already springing into life to be en- 
couraged, and new interests to form. 
The young people of the neighborhood 
eagerly welcome the reading-circle or 
the home-study club to bring into their 
lives something of the intellectual stim- 
ulus that is beginning to be so generally 
sought for. The college-graduate should 
not, of course, make the mistake of try- 



234 COLLEGE TRAINING 

ing to force at once upon such groups 
of young people a standard of judg- 
ment, taste, and acquirement that it has 
taken her four years of undivided atten- 
tion and work in college-life to reach, to 
say nothing of the special preparatory 
discipline that made the college-life pos- 
sible. She should enter into their lives 
and plans with a due regard for condi- 
tions of limitation, and a keen sympathy 
for aspiration, that will prevent her from 
assuming the airs of the " superior per- 
son," so irritating and unpleasant to 
those before whom they are flaunted. 

The sad lack of the country district is 
of healthful and pleasantly varied inter- 
ests. There is apt to be in such com- 
munities a survival of the old Puritan 
spirit that regards the ordinary amuse- 
ments of frivolous youth as enticements 



FOR WOMEN. 235 

of Satan, and classes as his followers all 
partakers in them. What are the poor 
youngsters to do who are forbidden to 
dance, or to pass the time with a harm- 
less game of cards in their own homes ? 
If there is no strong intellectual influ- 
ence prevalent, they will assemble un- 
occupied, in strictly youthful groups, 
where the proverbial result of idle 
hands, and minds too, will follow. De- 
barred from other exercise of their 
faculties, and from decorous pretexts 
for association with their kind, they are 
reduced to meeting for the bare purpose 
of gazing upon one another, and occupy 
their time in the parlor duo of empty 
conversation, or in the dangerous soli- 
tude a deux of the evening buggy-ride. 
In such a community the college- 
woman has a worthy work before her. 



236 COLLEGE TRAINING 

Reading-clubs, debating-societies, and 
such occupations give young people op- 
portunity for the social pleasures they 
long for so naturally, and fill up the time 
they spend together with wholesome in- 
terests, that keep the mind from dwell- 
ing on what is unwholesome and trivial. 
In such occupations the older members 
of the community may join, and it is 
only when old and young are brought 
together in the simple and natural rela- 
tions of common interests and pursuits 
that a really healthy society is formed. 

There need be no lack of resource in 
even the smallest place for interesting 
both old and young. The locality will 
afford ample illustrative material for 
many of the natural sciences and for 
most of the social sciences. The just- 
graduated biologist can find a rich treas- 



FOR WOMEN. 237 

ure for her own further studies, and 
for the wonder and delight of her whole 
neighborhood, in the old pond just back 
of the village ; the newly fledged his- 
torian and political scientist can teach 
many a chapter of general history and 
social law out of the village records 
and traditions, and from village insti- 
tutions, which lend color and interest to 
what would otherwise be a bare book 
knowledge, learned only to be forgotten. 
There is, beneath the classes made 
up of those who have, even if they do 
not use it, opportunity to provide for 
their own higher wants and needs by 
reason of their ability to provide com- 
fortably for their own material support, 
another class, which, if able to care for 
the body, can do little more than that, 
and needs help in caring for the higher 



238 COLLEGE TRAINING 

part of life. This is the class supposed 
to afford our "social problem," though 
it may be doubted whether the classes 
above them do not afford "social prob- 
lems " quite as serious. In the work 
of caring for this under class, the col- 
lege-woman takes a peculiar interest, 
a circumstance that shows how little 
the collegiate training has unsexed 
woman out of her instinct of care and 
protection of the weak. Charity has 
long been considered woman's espe- 
cial work, which, like the work of the 
mother, needed only instinct and nat- 
ural emotion to make it effective. The 
lesson is being taught now, however, 
that the elements of society are too del- 
icate, too complex, and too dangerous 
in their possible activities, to be dealt 
with in this primitive way. To do good 



FOR WOMEN. 239 

and not harm we must know exactly 
what we are working with. 

According to this new idea, the col- 
lege-woman is the one of all others to 
take up this task. This fitness is partly 
due to her general training, which has 
tended to make her cautious, clear- 
sighted, distrustful of too hasty general- 
ization, respectful of accuracy, observant 
of conditions. Contrary to the general 
notion, the college professor of to-day 
is the least of a theorist; the so-called 
" facts " of popular thought, when tried 
by his wider acquaintance with tested 
truth, are seen to be the "theory," 
while his so-called "theory" is found 
to be simply the consolidation and brief 
expression of thousands and thousands 
of proved and ascertained facts. His 
pupil, then, goes out from his instruc- 



24O COLLEGE TRAINING 

tion with consideration of difficulties, 
dangers, and uncertainties, that will 
make her work solid and valuable when 
done. 

The special fitness of the college- 
woman for this work is also partly due 
to the special direction the modern col- 
lege is taking in its instruction. The 
distinctively social sciences, conducted 
on an observational basis, and thus 
freed from the reproach of unreality 
that would be cast upon them by ex- 
clusive devotion to the abstract, are 
taught more and more in our colleges, 
and are studied by a larger and larger 
proportion in each college-group. Mod- 
ern methods of history, of economics, 
of sociology, tend to the appreciation 
of the human being as a most complex 
subject of study, demanding the greatest 



FOR WOMEN. 24I 

caution, keenness of observation, and 
fineness of discrimination in the pursuit. 

So, in her work for the less fortunate 
classes, the college-graduate will not be 
found blindly administering social nos- 
trums of any kind, for she knows too 
much of the intricacies of things to 
hope for sudden and miraculous heal- 
ing of all social disorders ; nor will she 
be found trusting far to any machinery 
of social reform, however skilfully con- 
structed, since she recognizes in indi- 
vidual personality the power that gives 
effectiveness to all machinery, and that 
can act by itself, without this mechani- 
cal aid, in moulding and guiding the 
character of others. 

The tolerance she has learned at col- 
lege helps her, too, in this work. The 
destruction there of certain artificial dis- 



242 COLLEGE TRAINING 

tinctions, and the establishment of cer- 
tain broadly human standards, make 
her ready to meet those whom she is 
to deal with, not with the palpable effort 
to throw aside social constraint shown 
by those who, however willing to help 
others, yet feel themselves different in 
kind from others, — an effort so easily 
seen and felt that it spoils the effect 
of all their work, — but naturally, sim- 
ply, and easily, on the ground of our 
common humanity, with a true human 
kindness that does not need to throw 
down barriers, because it is not en- 
closed by any. 

In all classes of society, whether up- 
per or under, closely grouped or widely 
scattered, the lesson to be taught by 
the college-woman seems to be that 
learned by her in the college, ■ — how 



FOR WOMEN. 243 

to live the best life. The task of the 
college-woman everywhere seems to be 
to indicate the true values of life ; in 
the words of one who was pointing out 
the special work of the college-woman 
in the college-settlement, to " suggest an 
inward wealth apart from outward pos- 
sessions." 

It is pleasant to know that in all this 
work for the community, of whatever 
kind, the worker gets fully as much 
good as she gives. It is not a one-sided 
matter ; in fact, the worker often feels 
that if it is one-sided, the balance of 
benefit received lies with her. The 
world of men and things that she comes 
in contact with she recognizes as the 
living, breathing, growing reality, of 
which all the text-books, all the works 
of literature and of art, are but the faint 



244 COLLEGE TRAINING 

and inadequate representations. She 
will have a sense of keener enjoyment 
in her theoretic knowledge by coming 
close to the concrete basis of it ; she 
will have for the concrete much more 
interest and appreciation, stored as her 
mind is with the views of thinking man 
from past ages down, in regard to its 
different phases. She makes the joyful 
discovery, too, that the days of learning 
are not over when the college doors 
close behind her, but that all life is a 
progress in that ever-delightful path. 



FOR WOMEN. 245 



CHAPTER IX. 

COLLEGE TRAINING FOR THE WAGE- 
EARNER. 

A LARGE proportion of the gradu- 
ates from our women's colleges 
find themselves obliged to enter some 
paid occupation after finishing the col- 
lege-course ; and they have, in many- 
cases, obtained the privileges of that 
course only on the ground that it would 
help them later in such paid occupation. 
They must, then, consider closely just 
what the college can do for them, not 
merely as a means of personal improve- 
ment and general social benefit, but in 
the pressing and practical business of 
earning a living. 



246 COLLEGE TRAINING 

It may seem somewhat discouraging 
to say, as we have to if we look fairly 
at conditions, directly and ostensibly 
it can do little or nothing. And yet 
this is the plain truth that has to be 
told. 

In the long history of the college, 
we find that two purposes have always 
been contending for mastery there, — 
the purpose of culture, or the building 
up of intellect and taste for its own 
sake, and the purpose of utility, or 
the acquirement of knowledge and skill 
for the use it may be put to in doing 
something else. No college has ever, 
probably, been quite without the influ- 
ence of either of these; but at one 
period the one has had more weight 
than the other, and at another period 
the weight has gone to the other side. 



FOR WOMEN. 247 

The growth on the whole has been 
toward the preponderance of the culture 
ideal, partly owing to the revival of 
Greek thought, with its scorn of the 
trader, partly owing to the psychological 
fact that men are exceedingly unwilling 
to drop anything they have once taken 
up, so that utility-studies of a past age, 
the utility of which has gone by, are 
kept as culture-studies by a later gen- 
eration. 

The college of to-day is distinctly a 
culture-institution. The effort made 
some twenty or twenty-five years ago to 
introduce utility under the garb of sci- 
ence has had the curious result of trans- 
forming science into another branch of 
culture. The scientist in the college is 
as fully absorbed in the beauty, the 
order, the intellectual plan, of his work, 



248 COLLEGE TRAINING 

and the joy of mastery for its own sake, 
as the humanist is, and, in general, dis- 
regards every-day utility quite as com- 
pletely. 

To get direct and special preparation 
for any line of paid work, the student 
must go to some technical school. As 
the college can turn out its graduate 
ready to give to others, to some extent, 
what he has received there, teaching 
may be regarded as a partial exception 
to the above rule. A large proportion 
of our college-graduates, and an espe- 
cially large proportion of our women- 
graduates from colleges, who take up 
paid occupations at all, become teachers 
without further preparation. The col- 
lege is not, however, strictly speaking, 
a technical school, even for teachers. 
The pupil may learn there what to teach, 



FOR WOMEN. 249 

but how to teach is an art in itself, and 
is coming to be more and more regarded 
as such, so that it is thought to need its 
own appropriate technical training. 

If we next inquire in what occupa- 
tions college training is directly opera- 
tive in securing larger money-returns 
after the special technical training is 
added to it, we meet with the answer, 
practically none where we can trace 
directly a measurable and tangible ad- 
vantage arising from it. The teacher 
to-day, it is true, stands a better chance 
with a college degree than without it ; 
but in this line the competition is so 
severe that the holding of a degree does 
not so much mean the securing of a 
higher salary, as it does the chance of 
securing a place at all. The level of 
requirement seems to have mounted 



250 COLLEGE TRAINING 

somewhat above the level of opportu- 
nity and remuneration. The worker 
who wants to teach must be much bet- 
ter prepared for her work than ever 
before, but her pay is not increased in 
proportion to the improvement in her 
preparation. In law, in the ministry, 
and as a physician, the worker may 
achieve an ample success without col- 
lege training; and observation of the 
field of journalism seems to show that 
accuracy, scholarship, and cultivated 
taste, such as are acquired in the col- 
lege, are rather hindrances than other- 
wise to a paying journalistic career. 
The successful librarian does not need 
to be a college-graduate, nor is it found 
that in mercantile employments a col- 
lege training is directly necessary. The 
shrewd business mind does not need a 



FOR WOMEN. 251 

collegiate education to enable it to turn 
money over to advantage, and it is often 
questioned whether such education is 
not something of a drawback to success 
in this line. 

If the college, then, does not fit the 
paid worker directly for any special pur- 
suit, how is she to justify herself in 
spending time and money on a training 
that she can only afford because it is 
going to be of some practical benefit to 
her? 

The training given by the college is 
of practical benefit to its pupil ; though 
that benefit cannot be marked out with 
a foot-rule, or counted up in dollars and 
cents. It has its practical use for her 
in general by making a more complete 
person of her. The richness of re- 
source, the discipline of temperament, 



252 COLLEGE TRAINING 

the breadth and tolerance that make 
the college-graduate an efficient mother 
and a valuable social influence, are just 
as useful in the paid occupations. The 
college-trained teacher may not find the 
opportunity three times in her teaching 
experience of teaching directly those 
higher matters that she learned in the 
college, but everything that she does 
teach will be taught from a higher level 
and in a broader spirit. She stands 
where she can see into higher regions, 
and bring from them inspiration down 
below. She has in herself a general up- 
lift of spirit gained from her wide and 
familiar acquaintance with the best in 
the world of thought, that will commu- 
nicate itself to her pupils even when she 
is teaching them spelling and the mul- 
tiplication table. The qualities that 



FOR WOMEN. 253 

bring success to the lawyer or doctor 
are not always those strictly connected 
with the technical part of her work. In- 
sight, tact, general knowledge enough to 
give a sense of proportion, are a part of 
the professional woman's outfit that will 
prove of great value to her in one way 
and another, and that the college helps 
her to gain. The college-bred journalist, 
too, need not wholly despair; she has 
a broader foundation to build on than 
has her uneducated fellow-worker, and 
may find what she fails to earn in money 
value amply made up to her by the in- 
creased satisfaction she can take in her 
work, which, from her training, stands 
the chance of being better in itself, of 
being better placed when it appears 
before the world, and of being held 
in higher regard and respect by the 



254 COLLEGE TRAINING 

best part of the reading public than the 
work of the average untrained or half- 
trained newspaper writer. The training 
given by the college seems to be quite 
thrown away in business life, yet even 
here there is a possible use for it. While 
the college does not and cannot teach 
the art of money-making, it does and 
can teach something of the general uni- 
formities that prevail in the economic 
and social world, and so can, to some 
extent, preserve its pupil from the vital 
error of thinking that laws of nature 
may be violated with profit even to 
one's self, at the call of some pressing 
personal interest. 

There is much, too, of the method 
and habit of thought learned in the 
college that will be of benefit to the 
paid worker. While the college has 



FOR WOMEN. 255 

not trained her in the details of any- 
especial activity, it has trained her in 
certain general principles common to 
all activity; and these, learned in one 
occupation, may be conveniently and 
easily applied to another. The college- 
student has been obliged to administer 
her' affairs in order ; task follows task, 
and requirement follows requirement, so 
that she must make for herself some 
plan of arrangement, or be overwhelmed 
by her work. She has learned to apply 
herself to her business with systematic 
industry, and to control her attention 
and her thoughts when she has a piece 
of work to do until that piece of work 
is done. In her intercourse with pro- 
fessors and fellow-students, and as a 
result of their calls upon her for reci- 
tation, examination, society work, de- 



256 COLLEGE TRAINING 

bates, and the like, she has acquired a 
certain alertness of mind that makes 
her ready to produce what she knows, 
and to find in it all possible suggestions 
and connections with the thoughts and 
plans of others. She has learned to 
discriminate between the more and the 
less important ; she has learned what it 
is to be accurate, and has trained her- 
self in patience to reach this ideal. All 
this is useful training for practical life. 
The ability to take up a complicated 
matter right end first, to attend to each 
detail of it in proper order, and to stick 
at it until it is done, and done well, is 
as useful and helpful in the trades and 
professions as it is in solving the prob- 
lems of the Calculus, or in interpreting 
a Greek text. 

Even though she recognizes the fact, 



FOR WOMEN. 257 

however, that the college training will 
be of real value to her in remunerative 
work, the woman-graduate will probably 
have an uncomfortable moment or two 
when she first steps foot out from the 
cloistered quiet of the college into the 
whirring confusion of the world. In 
the college everything was arranged in 
definite order; each person had an as- 
signed place in a definitely graded sys- 
tem. The Freshman becomes a Soph- 
omore, then a Junior and a Senior, each 
with prescribed duties, privileges, and 
obligations. From the degree of A.B. 
she may "proceed to the degree of" 
A.M. by regular stages, or to the degree 
of Ph.D. 

In the world no such orderly proces- 
sion of events, no such definite placing 
of persons, is apparent ; what the new 



258 COLLEGE TRAINING 

graduate sees there is a seemingly plan- 
less struggle to get ahead in matters 
unworthy of attention from a trained 
and scholarly mind. The world's activi- 
ties appear a confused jumble, now 
starting up out of nothing, and now 
ending suddenly in nothing, systemati- 
cally related to nothing fixed and con- 
stant nor to each other. The general 
public, which is also the general pay- 
master, wants one thing to-day and 
another to-morrow; and most of the 
things it wants, seem to be the mate- 
rial goods of life or else the vulgar and 
trivial sorts of intellectual wares. She 
finds, to her discouragement, that the 
degree she has worked so long and so 
hard for, and has perhaps taken with 
such high distinction, is not an imme- 
diate " open sesame " to the world's 



FOR WOMEN. 259 

treasure-house, and that there is no 
open market for essays on "The Halo- 
gen Elements in Carbon Compounds" 
or " The Imperfect Indicative in Plautus 
and Terence." In all this uncertain 
region she has ventured out into, the 
graduate sees no place for the power 
of abstract and systematic thought, 
the feeling for the ideal and the univer- 
sal, that she has learned to train and to 
cherish in the college ; and she begins 
to feel that she is decidedly unfitted for 
life outside that pleasant enclosure. 

The graduate must, however, keep up 
good courage. Closer acquaintance will 
show some order in this apparent chaos ; 
and, little by little, glimpses of oppor- 
tunity that will lead to wider vistas will 
open up to her. Much of her future 
success will depend upon the attitude 



26o COLLEGE TRAINING 

of mind she assumes at this transition 
period. 

She must, in the first place, admit 
and act upon the fact that the particu- 
lar order and gradation of qualities and 
persons observed in the college does 
not hold good in the outside world ; 
she cannot expect to be known and 
valued in the community in general as 
she was known and valued in the col- 
lege, because she was the first scholar 
in her class, or the medallist of the 
year. The graduate has, in fact, to 
make a new place for herself in the 
community, in doing which, all the good 
things she has gained at college will 
help ; but these she must break up and 
use as raw material, so to speak, — she 
will probably not be able to use them in 
just their original form. 



FOR WOMEN. 26l 

In making the new place, the gradu- 
ate must drop her preconceived notions 
as to what that place is to be. She 
should not set a fixed limit of occupa- 
tion for herself, below which she feels 
that everything is unworthy of her. 
She must be content to snatch a foot- 
hold anywhere on the rapidly whirling 
coach of the world's affairs, until she 
can, by ingenuity and activity, climb, 
somehow or other, to the box-seat and 
drive. However competent she may 
be for that place from the start, she 
must remember that her fellow-passen- 
gers do not at first know it; and she 
must get aboard with them somehow in 
order to convince them. 

The college-woman may take up al- 
most any occupation without fear that 
she will be degraded below her own 



262 COLLEGE TRAINING 

proper standard by so doing. It is not 
the occupation itself, but the person 
employed in it, that makes it seem low 
or high. In the days when domestic 
service was performed by members of 
the family or by a neighbor's assis- 
tance, when the well-educated, self-re- 
specting daughters of the quiet country 
community went into factories to earn 
a living, there was no thought or talk 
of the social disabilities of the " ser- 
vant-girl " and the " factory-hand." All 
that is needed to make a place respected 
is that the holder shall be respectable; 
and it might be a good thing if some 
of our college-graduates should turn 
their attention to the regeneration of 
society by the practical teaching of this 
truth. 

The college-woman will find ample 



FOR WOMEN. 263 

opportunity to make her qualities felt 
wherever she goes; and not only this, 
she will find avenues of pleasurable ac- 
tivity and usefulness where she would 
little suspect them. When one sees an 
occupation only from the outside, one 
misses all the interesting detail of the 
work, all the pleasant possibilities of 
intercourse with others that may mean 
so much when one looks from the in- 
side. There is a peculiar pleasure in 
mastering the routine and understand- 
ing the hidden workings of almost any 
occupation. There is always an oppor- 
tunity, not only to learn the ins and 
outs of the occupation as it stands,-— 
and learning is always a pleasure, — 
but to exercise powers of invention and 
organization in improving and perfect- 
ing the occupation. Every pursuit, too, 



264 COLLEGE TRAINING 

offers its own particular opportunity for 
personal service to others, a chance, 
that if taken, brings perpetual delight 
and interest. 

Although the worker may feel, how- 
ever, that there is good to be got out of 
any occupation, she may recognize that 
not all occupations are alike in their 
opportunities ; and she has a right to 
personal preference in choosing among 
them. It is not necessary that she 
should remain fixed all her life in the 
spot she has dropped into at first. 
While she must show a due humility 
and willingness to take hold anywhere 
at the beginning, she should keep her 
eyes always open for chances of wider 
usefulness and more congenial activity. 
If she does this, and is not afraid to 
move about to test her own value, and 



FOR WOMEN. 265 

to assert it where it seems necessary, 
to take some risks, and to assume some 
responsibilities, she will, little by little, 
find her true place in the world. 

In selecting a permanent occupation, 
the graduate will do well to show some 
originality of thought. She should not 
be prevented from a trial of any plans 
she may make for herself by well-mean- 
ing friends who cannot see possibilities 
in anything outside the beaten track of 
customary occupation. The worker is 
apt to do better outside the beaten 
track than in it. Looking over the 
field of the paid activities to-day, one 
finds that a large proportion of them 
are not the simple outcome of the fun- 
damental and changeless needs of man- 
kind, and thought of because hunger 
and thirst, cold and heat, make them 



266 COLLEGE TRAINING 

inevitable necessities, but are the out- 
right invention of alert-minded persons 
who have had something of their own 
to offer, and have created a need by- 
supplying it. The worker who thinks 
of a new work to do, is usually led to it 
by some natural taste and inclination of 
her own, which is of itself a warrant that 
the work will be especially well done, 
and hence worth paying for. There is, 
too, a better chance for reward in the 
new occupation by reason of the work- 
ing of competition. The mechanically 
minded person can see only one or two 
definite pursuits to engage in, with def- 
initely fixed salaries, better or worse. 
As most people permit themselves to 
look at life only in this mechanical way, 
a great rush is made for these well- 
known occupations, which keeps the 



FOR WOMEN. 26j 

money-reward to be gained from them 
at a low level. Each one, then, who 
enters a new occupation is not only 
benefiting herself by entering a field 
where there is less competition, but is 
also helping her fellow-workers by doing 
just so much to relieve the pressure 
in the older occupations. 

The community, too, is benefited by 
such a course. We have about aban- 
doned the idea held by certain philo- 
sophic sects, and certain schools of 
religion, and by them introduced into 
wide currency in thought if not in prac- 
tice, that the highest form of life is 
reached by the reduction of human 
wants to the lowest level. Life in the 
physical organism consists in a constant 
interchange of waste and repair, of 
need and satisfaction; and the more 



268 COLLEGE TRAINING 

vigorous is this interchange, the more 
complete is the life. In the social or- 
ganism the same law holds ; the succes- 
sion of want and gratification there is 
no less truly life than the process of 
waste and repair in the body. 

The completest life of the social or- 
ganism, which we call "civilization," 
like the completest life in the physical 
organism, is attained when wants and 
satisfactions are so related in a mutu- 
ally supporting scheme that they lead 
to ever-deepening sources of power and 
ever-widening possibilities of happiness. 
The community with the most varied 
activities, and the richest resources of 
supply, provided that they are harmo- 
niously related, and afford a foundation 
for an indefinite succession of other ac- 
tivities and resources, has the fullest 



FOR WOMEN. 269 

life ; and that member in it who devel- 
ops a new social want, and at the same 
time provides the means for its gratifi- 
cation, is in so far helping it to attain 
this ideal completeness. 

The college-graduate has no reason 
for discouragement over her chances for 
making her own way. Success in any 
line of life depends on personal charac- 
ter and power; these the college tends 
to train and to develop, and these will 
make themselves inevitably felt where- 
ever they are found. Personal charac- 
ter will make a low occupation high, a 
trivial one important, by its use of them ; 
it will make a new occupation suited to 
its needs if it does not find one already 
made ; it will discover anywhere an op- 
portunity for helping and influencing 
others ; it will, in short, in the exact 



270 COLLEGE TRAINING. 

degree of its own worthiness, despite 
all the hindrances and difficulties that 
may be opposed to it, finally and surely 
rise to its proper level, and receive its 
fitting and adequate reward in the ap- 
preciation and approval of the commu- 
nity. 



